Lucien shakes his head from side to side. He hasn’t moved away from me. He sits there.
‘That’s not a good idea, Simon,’ he says. Says it slow. ‘It’s too dangerous. It can’t happen. You do not want it.’
I find myself shaking my head also. A slow mirror of him. I don’t know what I am refuting exactly. If I’m saying yes or no to what he said. No, it cannot happen. Yes, it cannot happen. No, I do want it. Yes, I do want it.
‘All that time,’ I say, ‘I followed you. You had my memories safeguarded. You knew where I was from and what had happened to me and you knew who I was. You knew…’ I stop.
Then the shame rises up and it burns. He knew this, the other thing, the secret of my regard for him. Of course he knew. How much longer than me? I think of my heart’s keen leap in his company, my eyes on him always, my fear on the race when I held him, and I cannot believe how bloody ignorant I have been. The embarrassment flares up inside and I know I have to leave.
He shakes his head. He has not turned away. He has not moved.
‘You shouldn’t think so,’ he says. His voice is rough, and catches. ‘You are not so easy to know as you might think. Not so easy to know at all.’
His hand goes to the back of my head then. His smell of rivermud, sky, smoke, as he leans forward and kisses me.
My whole body in my heart and mouth. His hands in my hair. The long lean of his body hard by. The candle flickers.
After a while he pushes me back. He is breathing hard. His grip on my shoulders is so tight I can’t move my arms. I can’t help the huge foolish grin on my face either. The only thing I can think to say is his name.
His grip gets tighter. What is he scared of? It’s simple, I want to tell him. His name then mine. Question and answer. ‘Lucien,’ I tell him, and kiss him.
‘Simon,’ he says at last.
His face is so serious, yet I am grinning away and my whole body feels light. I lift his fingers from their grip.
We take his bunk, though it’s much too narrow for both of us. My bare back to his bare chest. All night the edge of the bunk cuts into my hip and I lie awake listening to his breath, breathing in the same air as him. I feel my happiness turn and wheel overhead.
Into the Belly of the Whale
We travel and the countryside changes. It becomes greener, lusher; the river gets narrower. On the fifth night the moon is full, and there are tall buildings, twisted and bent, in the distance. We go past two small islands in the river. To our port side runs the wide, ugly scar of a concrete road with many tracks. Above it, tall, dead lamps like those still left in parts of London.
Lucien comes to sit next to me, where I’m craning my head out of the porthole. He’s holding the paper map that Netty gave me.
‘Callum says we’re here.’ He points to a place near where Netty has marked with an X. ‘The village is called Reading.’
We stop just before a large lock. Rushing water speeds past in the dark, and the wind pushes between the broken buildings on either side of us.
We hood up. I sing Lucien the tune that Netty gave me and he sings it back.
The village is grey and ugly. We walk through a huge concrete tunnel lined in yellow-painted mettle. The tune takes us along a wide sunken road with half-broken walls high above it. It feels bare and exposed in the moonlight. After walking through the wide, quiet streets and rubble for ten minutes, the tune takes us down a narrow, straight street of houses. Those houses that are still standing are small and redbrick and all the same — jammed together with windows along the front like staring eyes.
There’s no glass left, of course, but about half have the windows boarded on the inside. Those are the lived-in ones, I guess.
Lucien counts off the beats from the corner and we reach the middle of the street before the tune runs out. The house looks the same as all the others. There’s a garden in front with overgrown hedges. Lucien pushes the gate open and it swings with a mettle note, C sharp. The grass out front is covered in moonlight. There’s an old concrete fountain sitting in the middle filled with burnt paper, flakes of ash sprinkled around it. At its base is an old leather shoe half eaten by foxes.
The moon makes strange shadows with the shapes of the scrunched-up paper in the dish of the fountain. We both look at the door. All is silent. Lucien turns to me.
‘I’ll wait for you here in the garden.’
‘You’re not coming?’ For the first time I notice the cold slip around my shoulders and ribs like a wet garment.
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Look at my eyes. She’ll see I’m from the Order. It’s best if you go alone.’
‘What am I meant to do?’ I don’t like the weak sound of my voice. I have been going along this road because it’s Lucien’s road. I know I have anger kindled down below, for what happened to my parents, for the things we have all lost, but it is out of reach. I feel like I’m listening to a song around me and I have no idea what part to take.
Lucien looks at me and his eyes are lunar also, casting out into the night. His hair is silver. I straighten my back. I am ashamed of my uncertainty.
‘None of us knows what we are meant for,’ he says. ‘Even if a person keeps their memories intact, don’t suppose the way forward is always clear. But we know a thing that needs to happen. So we must get help.’
Behind my eyes, I see black shapes, as if against a white sky, coming together in patterns like water does. Turning, wheeling, dispersing…
If only, I think, the way forward and the given meaning were lit clear. If I had a name or a meaning that was one single note.
‘Take this,’ says Lucien, and reaches inside his T-shirt. He takes his mother’s ring from the pouch, flicks the catch and removes the guildmedal. Then he puts the medal back into the leather pocket and puts its cord over my head. I feel the Lady’s mild pulse.
He walks away until he’s standing under a half-dead oak tree in the corner of the garden. For a beat it looks as if the branches are growing from his head, crowning him. Then I turn, crunch up the gravel path, take a breath, knock.
Silence. I put my ear to the door. It was once green, but now its paint is curled and peeling off in flakes.
Far off inside the house, there’s a bang like something falling off a shelf. I wait and there is silence again. I might have imagined it.
Behind me in the garden, I can feel Lucien watching, blind as the moonlight makes him, but still watching. I reach out, grasp the door handle and turn.
The door opens partway and my eyes adjust slowly. My heart is beating tight with fear. The hallway is dark, but there’s a window at the end that gives onto a back garden and lets in a thin corridor of moonlight.
Once in, I see why the door did not open fully. The corridor is packed. Above me, the walls are lined with boxes of every colour and size. Stacked to twice my height on haphazard shelves made from thin wood and bricks, from rope and cardboard, from para cartons, from instrument cases. Crammed into the shelves, like a crazy person’s market stall, are strange objects.
Silver forks and knives sit next to strings of bright coloured para beads. Piles of sheet music leaf out of rough piles onto children’s toys. There is old electrickery, paraboards with keys of code printed on them, antique clothing. There are ancient shoes, board games. I see a boat anchor, a dead pot plant, small mettle men holding weapons and crouched in still poses, mould-covered pillows, dolls with staring eyes. And hundreds of instruments, from the cheapest to the most valuable. One side of the hall is straddled by an old upright klavier, half of its keys gone like gappy front teeth and the top lifted off like an emptied skull so that more objects can nestle into the strings. There are clarionets, viols, tambors and, down in the corner glowing softly, a transverse flute made out of pure palladium.