The room we enter is a maze. Boxes form corridors that stretch above my head. Cloths hang down and filter the moonlight that is falling from somewhere, a window high above us. Twists and turns of boxes and finally into a clearing. In the middle of the room, there is a space of cleared floor and on it a woven rug of many colours. A solid bookcase leans against the back wall behind. Ahead is a skeleton leaning slack against a mettle stand, his legs bent in a strangely casual way, from the hip. The skeleton wears a woman’s straw bonnet with faded red grosgrain ribbons and tuberoses made of starched silk. Above him, propped against a machine like a tiny klavier with codeletters instead of keys, is a boar’s head, the mouth open and eyes glazed in surprise. Next to that is an immense stoppered jar filled with glass beads of all sizes. I wonder how it survived Allbreaking.
‘Sit, sit,’ Mary says. ‘Or kneel. Knee to heel. Kneel to pray. Pray to heal. Have you ever seen anything so lovely?’ She gestures at the mess all around us. ‘No! Never!’ she answers for me. ‘Don’t be afraid.’
I watch her move lightly around the room, darting, alighting, swooping from place to place. She ducks down corridors, returns, flits off again. As she goes, she touches objects. At first I think it is at random, a sort of crazed dance, but then I see there is intention in it. She moves across and reaches an arm to grope up to a piece of fabric that hangs down from the ceiling. Then back to a patchwork-covered cardboard box that sits next to me on the floor. She pirouettes over to the skeleton, bows at the waist, then reaches up to tip his flowery bonnet. Subito a picture flashes up of something I saw once; it must have been in Essex. An old memory, at our crosshouse hall. Exhibition Chimes and an organist brought in from the Citadel to play along on our hall organ. A small man in his white robes darting light like that, like a butterfly, changing the stops, tapping the bass out with his feet, the same look of rapt, joyful attention on his face.
As she goes, her eyes flit and shift, open and close. Expressions enter and then leave. Joy, wonder, humour, affection, love, pride, contentment and a constant stream of patter…
‘Oh, the beautiful boy, yes, eyes only for him, a mouth like a knife and hair like sunset, ah, my darling. Come, unbutton here. Loosen your collar a bit, that’s it. Yes, of course I remember. Hopscotch and the daisies out. A fine time we had. Five under your feet and it’s springtime. And in the swim we were. In the Isis. You carried me home the whole way, soaked to the skin, never stopping for a breath…’
She stops, turns like a spinning top until she’s standing still at last in front of me on the rug. She closes her eyes and her face glows with happiness and I can imagine her young.
‘Such love, my dear. Such capacity for love! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! But I forget — you can’t see it yet, can you? Not standing there like that, or sitting. Patience on a memorial.’
I shake my head. I look around the room and all I can see is junk, debris. Rubbish. Then her face changes again. She looks tired, even older, if it were possible.
‘Oh, but I am glad you are here at last, ducky. I admit it’s getting too much for an old bird like Mary. The pretty ones. I love the pretty ones, but it’s the bad ones, the sad ones, the heavy ones. Too heavy for an old back. They need young shoulders. But we can’t pick and choose to suit ourselves.’ She walks slow, as if she is being forced, and I almost see her back bending, hunching further. She stands in front of a pile of old paintings in frames. On the top sits a small white leather shoe, a slipper.
Her hand swoops and she clasps it, and as she does, her face crumples. Tears fold out of her eyes. Her mouth opens in a wide broken arc.
‘The pretty one,’ she calls. ‘Oh, but I loved her even though I didn’t know I would. There were curls there.’ She strokes her temple, the old white hair at the side of her head. ‘Curls, and they smelt of sunshine.’ The tears are running steady down her face. She holds the shoe under her breast. ‘Curls and a birthmark on her little left leg. And when you tickled her, she laughed and laughed. As if she was made for laughing.’
She stops abruptly, puts the shoe down carefully in its place. She closes her eyes and breathes in silence. When she opens them, they are clear again.
‘And what would she be in music, do you think, my dear? A baby with curls like sunshine? A flute, a piccolo perhaps? If they cared for such a pursuit, that is? No. Chimes could not capture that. Where’s the basso profundo for a dead baby, darling? What’s the discant for the mess of loss?’
The mess of loss, I think. Chaos. Disorder. Junk. And it brings home what I had known but somehow managed to ignore. Before I can think further, I am on my knees and retching. So many memories, so many lives. So much pain, so much forgetting. I want to vomit, but I cannot. I retch until my throat is raw and my head is throbbing.
When I open my eyes again, Mary is kneeling next to me on the mat. She wipes my mouth with a corner of the cloak.
‘Who in the guild sent you?’ she asks. ‘I thought they were all gone. I’d almost given up hope that they’d find the next keeper.’
And I understand what the whole performance has been. She thinks that I’ve come to replace her. She wants me to stay here with her, with all of the memories. I shake her off.
‘No,’ I say. ‘That’s not what I’m here for. Not to keep the memories. I need your help.’
‘Are you sure about that, my dear?’ Her voice wheedles and curls. ‘You’ve got the gift, don’t you? Who else is going to take these when I’m gone? They’ve left me alone here for too long.’ Then she pulls in close to me again and I hear her voice in my ear.
‘They’re all here now, you know. All the memories have found their way back to me. The whole story is here in my keeping. They’re all mine, and they can be yours.’
She pulls back as if studying me, and she strokes my forearm.
I shake my head. ‘No,’ I say again. No to the thought of dwelling here in the twilight of all of these forgotten lives, living off the borrowed honey of their pain and joy like a strange insect. I pause and a picture comes. Not like an insect. Like a hunched bird waiting on a treebranch for flesh. Carrion. Carillon.
‘I’m not a memory keeper,’ I say again. And then, because she appears to be waiting for more, and because there seems little harm in it, I tell her.
‘We are travelling to the Citadel. We are going to destroy the Carillon.’
Whatever I expected her response to be, it was not laughter. Mary flaps away from me and hoots, her lips tucked over her teeth and tightened like a beak.
She gasps, breathless. ‘Hoo, hoo, hooo,’ she cries, and wipes her eyes, folds her cloak around her. ‘But I am pleased to make your acquaintance. How gracious of you to call in on your journey to the Citadel.
‘So you’re off to overthrow the Order? Ah, my dear, how many pairs of plucked dicky birds have I seen on that errand? And I suppose you’re just going to fly over the wall, are you? Easy as a pie full of blackbirds.’
I shrug, feeling the anger rise.
‘The one I’m travelling with, he has a gift for hearing, and he remembers without aid, without objectmemory,’ I say. ‘He was born in the Citadel, though he broke away and got to London. His sister is there still and waiting. She will help us to get inside.’
She stops laughing subito. She blinks, and she hums something to herself. She is peering at me. ‘And you?’ she says. ‘What do you do, my fettered kestrel?’