But Jemima does not look despairing or trapped. Then I think of the Carillon and I wonder if she is able to keep her memories. Is deafness an escape? Perhaps the closed room of her mind is actually full of strange and complex pictures and objects. Perhaps the memories in her head are able to form a line that moves along those walls from start to finish. I look at Jemima and my pity disappears.
I expected the inside of the boat to be all dust and disrepair, but what Jemima shows us is a narrow galley and a scrubbed kitchen table, bolted to the floor. Everywhere things are hanging — lanterns, small sacks of sugar and flour and coffee, knotted ropes of onions and garlic. Small copper pots sway above the large sterno, its gas cylinder lashed firm to a roof beam. The floor of the other half of the cabin is covered in a thick, rich rug with shapes in gold and black and red. There is a curtain and behind it two beds are fitted to the rounded sides of the boat, neat roughcloth covers over them. Beyond that a wooden slatted double door, very low.
‘That’s our room,’ says Jemima. ‘You two are sleeping here.’ She points to the bunks. She signs in solfege, slow so we can hear it. ‘It’s nice to have some company.’
‘We will leave after Chimes,’ Callum says. ‘And travel at night. You two want to move tacet,’ he says. ‘We can do that. We also like to remain muted, sotto voce.’ He signs to Jemima, who laughs again and nods.
‘It’s all quiet on the towpath now. No poliss. No sign of the Order. Narrowboaters have a good chain of call and response. Any movement and we’ll hear it.’ He signs to Jemima, speaking aloud too for my benefit. ‘Why don’t you take Simon for supplies, get some air. There are still a few tolls before Vespers.’
Jemima fetches two parabuckets and a large flat sack that she secures by straps to her back. I try to help her, but she shrugs me off and gestures me to follow. I look back to Lucien, but he has already disappeared behind the curtain into our new quarters.
It is strange to be walking beside somebody new, somebody not of the pact. Somebody whose bodymemory doesn’t share the confines of the tunnels and the vagaries of the map. Jemima, I notice, wastes movements. She turns often from side to side, looking all around her. She stops often to inspect things I would have thought hardly worth notice — a branch that has fallen across the concrete path, a pattern of leaves scattered, a cloud that moves lento overhead. I’m so used to the steady pace of Clare’s run and the silent measure of our shared task that I find several times I’ve outstripped Jemima and run ahead. Each time I expect an angry response. I see Clare with her quick kindle and her eyes sparking at me, but Jemima just smiles to herself as if she is looking at those pictures on the walls of her inward house. And each time I return like an overeager dog and take up her pace again.
I try to imagine what she sees in her world without music, without Chimes. I want to ask her where her happiness comes from. The trees are budding their new leaves and a thought comes into my head. They have a kind of rhythm in their upright trunks and their branches that start thick and then divide and get narrower and lighter and faster till they quiver in the air like breath past a clarionet reed. That is a rhythm you can see, not hear. Perhaps music happens elsewhere than in ears.
Jemima stops at a quiet corner of the canal and looks at the water and waits for a while, studying something that is invisible to me. Then she opens the flat bag. From inside she removes a mettle wheel from an old kid’s bike. Over the bike wheel is fitted a woven stickwrap sack like the kind that carry flour.
She ties rope lengths to three parts of the wheel and picks a few stones to weight the bag. Then she throws the whole thing into the water. After a long wait in which I almost stoop to touch her shoulder and sign my question of ‘What are you doing?’ she pulls it up subito. There, silver in the sack, are two fish, longer than my hand. Her grin flashes up at me presto and her eyebrows go up as if to say, ‘Yes? And what can you do?’ She dumps the fish in another sack, ties the neck to one of the iron rings along the canalside and submerges it under the water. I am still watching without any words, intrigued.
‘Dinner,’ she signs. And then she points to a thick bush that grows along the canal path and hands me one of the buckets. ‘Berries,’ she says.
I leave her fishing and walk along the path. The bush is thick with brambles and, behind that, dense clutches of blackberries. I pick hundreds, enough to fill the bucket. My fingers are stained deep red and stinging. I think about Lucien. I think about what we are trying to do. I wonder if we will ever come back or if we are leaving London forever.
Running
We travel lento. Lucien usually sits on the deck hooded, listening for any sign of poliss or the Order. Callum listens too, for the coded messages of the narrowboaters up and downriver.
Two nights in he reports to us there’s a tune doing the rounds. Poliss looking for two pactrunners who have made off with large quantities of Pale. Two of prentiss age and they are travelling by water. One tall with pale eyes; the other has brown hair. A prize rumoured.
‘Three hundred tokens,’ Callum says, ‘is a lot of money. You should both stay below deck as much as possible until the tune fades.’
So we do, though it’s close and cramped and I’m ready to go out of my skin with the itch to be in the tunnels.
To keep busy, Lucien tests my memory. We start with the day we’re on. Lucien’s voice, like in downsounding, leads me through the memories. Then back to the day before and the day before that. I wander through the strange events of the last eightnoch: finding Lucien on the race, the member of the Order in the crosshouse yard, poliss on the run, the discovery of the weapon. I reach six days, then seven, then eight. My head hurts, but it gets stronger each time. Then together we go back through my personal memories. My mother’s death, leaving Essex, finding Netty, losing Netty, joining the pact, finding Netty again. All that I can I share with Lucien.
Like in the storehouse, Lucien makes small notches on the edge of his bunk each morning as we travel. On the third day on the water we start something new.
Lucien asks, ‘How clear is your hold on the map?’
I look at him. In my mind’s ear I see our storehouse and the path down Liver Street steps. I follow it down the strand to Five Rover and I place myself in the amphitheatre. Then I try to see the map as it spreads from there. I can’t do it. My head is blank and empty. Panic starts in my hands, which go tight and gripped.
‘I can’t see it,’ I say, and my voice too is tight held, knuckle white.
‘Breathe,’ says Lucien. ‘Start slow.’
He sings then the tune of our amphitheatre, slow and circular with a slight dazzle of the Lady. I close my eyes and hear it, the fretted ceiling, the rust, the ferns, the silence of the tunnelmouths.
Then he sings the beginning of a simple run. A run that leaves the amphitheatre and moves in a circle of fifths. ‘Wait,’ I tell him.
Instead of trying to see the whole map lit up like the masterwork of some crazed spider, I focus just on the tunnel ahead. I sing the tune back to him as I go and in this way I follow his route — the comms tunnel, then a stormwater drain, then up into the walking tunnel at Mill Wall.
And to my surprise, the network of tunnels we’ve moved through, that spun round me without name in an untethered melody, all shift and settle into place. It’s as if I’m blindfolded and then the blindfold is taken off.