I’m tensed before I even know why. Then the voices are clear coming into the yard from around the crosshouse. I hear them before I see them. Singing. Laughter.
Men. Things move lento so I can look down and see my legs like they’re not even mine. Jeans with holes that are ragged like the sun is in the sky. I use my hands to make my legs move; then I get into the trees by crawling.
They are there in the yard.
Two of them. Not the same men as before. I watch them walk. And I see they’re not men at all. They are prentisses. But still I don’t move from where I sit. Prentisses are a danger just as men are.
One wiry, one heavyset. The first one moving his hands in the air and singing too. He is looking around, speaking to the other. Both are coming closer to where I’m sitting.
There’s pain in my arms, everywhere. The buzzing gets louder.
The two prentisses tread toward the trees where I am sitting. In the dirt in front of me is half an old plate. I grab it. Break it again so there’s sharpness.
The first prentiss is walking to me through a window in the buzzing. Dark confounded eyes, staring. Neckbroke rabbit in his hands, looking at me like I’m something he’s found caught in a snare. And sorry for it. But you can’t trust anything in this world, not even kindness.
I hiss at them.
I hold out the only weapon I can find.
I push out, away from the pictures in my head. The thing I’m holding clatters hard on the floorboards. The sound makes me jump and it’s that which shakes the pictures that cling around my head.
Sickness rises in me and I’m shaking. I force my head down between my knees, try to breathe, but it’s like the ground has come up hard and pushed out the air. The memory is not mine but Clare’s, and I have touched it, and somehow the pictures of her memory came into my head.
Things are swinging and I can’t find the place where they stop. My memory. Clare’s memory. I blink at the strangeness of it. How do I have it in my bag? And subito I see it again, but from outside not within, so it is my memory that flashes up not Clare’s. I see her sitting there in the crosshouse behind Paul’s where Brennan and I were singing the snares. So thin you could see the tendons in her face and shoulders and the rib bones through her T-shirt. And nothing in her eyes, though we could see the dark bruises on her, and blood on her shirt. She was terrified and it took me a while to realise that she thought we might hurt her. And though we held our hands out in front of us to show ‘no threat’, it didn’t matter. She still came at us, her teeth bared, the half-broke plate held like a knife.
The broken piece was her memory of joining the pact. And she must have given it to me. When? And I saw it and I don’t have time or desire to wonder at this right now.
I look close at the cut at the top of my arm. It is still painful.
‘It’s time,’ she said when we were standing on the strand. How many days ago now? And she showed me how she measured it. I will find her a better way, I think.
‘It’s time, Simon,’ says Lucien. He stands at the door of the open-roofed hut, in the sun.
The narrowboats in the canal mooring are shiny blacks and reds and greens, with polished brass and bright curtains. Along the wharf, people have risen into the morning. There are families sitting on the roofs of boats drinking tea from mugs. A few men paint and caulk the boats that stand on the jetty. A young couple leave their boat with tense strides and stand by a bench only a few feet away and begin to argue as if now they have left their home, they are all alone and no one is listening. Everybody around them is listening.
The narrowboat Lucien walks us to is at the farthest end of the mooring pool. The water round it is oily and grey, and the boat looks abandoned. It isn’t polished to the high shine of the others — it’s painted a thick black colour that is dusty and doesn’t reflect the light. There are brass handles and portholes, but they are also dulled and dusty. The curtains are drawn at the portholes. The only thing that marks it as lived in is a teeming garden of pots that grows on the roof. Pots tiny and large, mettle and clay and para. In them are herbs and flowers, bushy shrubs and plants with small leaves like stones.
‘Are you sure this is the right place?’ I ask. Lucien hushes me with a hand gesture and knocks a trick rhythm onto one of the cabin portholes. Inside, the curtain pulls back a few inches. I see a quick glimpse of green eyes and sandy eyebrows before it twitches into place. There is movement inside, and after a few beats a man’s head emerges from the cabin door and he’s on the deck, pulling on a T-shirt.
He’s older than us, a square and practical build, with quick fingers, a plain, energetic face and long hair tied back. The T-shirt has old code on it, and a picture of a skull with a lightning flash across it — an odd relic. His movements are precise as he jumps the short way to the path to stand in front of Lucien.
There is no exchange except the wad of tokens that the man sticks presto into the back pocket of his lean, faded jeans.
‘So, you boys want a ride on the Lily Bolero, I hear?’ he says, and for the first time smiles, which shifts his face from plain and square to handsomeness in a flash. ‘I’m Callum.’
The boat’s name is also that of a familiar jig, and as soon as I hear it, I know I won’t be able to shake the music free. I sing the nonsense words under my breath in a bid to clear them. ‘Lero Lero, Lily Bolero. Lily Bolero Lullen a Ba.’
Callum looks into the cabin window again, waves inside. ‘Hey, Jemima! We have guests. Come and show them around.’
Another face emerges from the cabin. It’s a girl a bit older than us. She stands on the deck to survey us with a look of confident appraisal. She’s not very tall, and she’s wearing a pair of jeans that are cut off and frayed above the knee, a sloppy blue shirt, a heavy pair of lace-up boots and a man’s green anorak, far too big. Her hair is dark brown and as long as the man’s, and I wonder if he is her father, but I have a feeling he isn’t.
‘Hello,’ she says, and her voice is different. Low and like there’s something in her mouth. Then she signs in solfege to Callum. She doesn’t sing, but her hands move so quick I miss half of it. Something about us, about pacts and pactrunners and how they’re not to be trusted.
I break in, ‘That’s not true.’
Callum turns to me and Jemima breaks off, turns round also and sees my indignant face. She begins to laugh.
‘She’s only joking,’ Callum says. And he signs it at the same time, which I find strange. Why use solfege as well as speech for something like that? Jemima is still laughing, a sound of pure humour. The joke is clearly at our expense, but it is so surprising to hear laughter that I cannot help but laugh also. I think I had forgotten what it sounded like.
‘You’ve been misled about pactrunners,’ I tell the girl. ‘The guilds are always badmouthing us, but they need our trade as much as the Order does.’ Something in me wants her to laugh again, to approve of us.
‘She can’t hear you,’ Callum says.
I stop laughing.
‘She’s deaf,’ he says.
Without thinking I look straight at Lucien. His face is as blank as mine and even paler than usual.
‘I didn’t know,’ I say. ‘I didn’t know that was possible.’
‘She lost her hearing when she was young,’ Callum says, sharp.
I struggle to imagine it. What could it be like? Like living in a closed room for one’s life. Cut off from joy and beauty and meaning.