She inclines her head, places my last memory on the shelf and moves toward me. She extends her hand and waits until mine is open before pressing the object into it and closing my fingers one by one.
‘The last one,’ she says, and smiles at me.
I breathe in and wait for the memory to take me, but nothing happens. I clench my hand tighter, close my eyes. But there is no movement.
I open my eyes.
‘This isn’t a memory,’ I say. ‘I kept my side of the bargain. Where’s yours?’
She is looking at me again with the wry, amused look on her face.
‘It’s more important than even a memory, lovely. It’s a little piece of acquired wisdom from one memory keeper to another.’
I open my fingers. On my palm is a clot of thread. Wool, cotton, silk, different colours all knotted together tight and hopeless.
‘What the hell is this?’
‘It’s a question,’ she says. ‘The question is, even if you have all of these memories, this grand and noble history of ours, how will it help? What is to make it anything but another version of events, another Onestory?’
I stare at the knot of threads on my hand. I feel raw and empty and blank. Some part of me refuses to think, refuses to engage in her puzzle.
She comes in close. ‘A clue, my dear. Where is the Order’s weakness? What is it they are afraid of?’
The tangled heap of threads is an irritation, a stupidity. It gives me a headache just thinking of untangling them, and then what would I do with it?
And like that, like a candle being lit, or a chord being struck, I understand the answer to her puzzle. I stare at her.
Mary nods to encourage me.
‘Yes?’
‘Mess,’ I say. Both Lucien and Mary have their eyes turned to me. They seem to sway in the lanternlight, but it’s just me.
‘They can’t stand mess,’ I say again. ‘Human mess. They can’t abide the things that don’t fit into a perfect harmony, a tidy chord. They wanted to perfect us. Their music doesn’t have a place for mistakes and errors, for people who love the ones they’re not meant to love, for babies with noses that run and those who are deaf and alone. In the end it can’t fit in things like grief and loss and stickiness and dirt.’
I think of the members of the Order I have seen with their shaved heads and their spare, nearly skeletal, frames. Their paleness not Lucien’s living pale, but of cloisters and practice rooms without sun.
‘And bodies. They are afraid of bodies. Because bodies betray us. They grow and change and they love and they leak and they get tired and sick and old and they shake and die.
‘They are afraid of these things,’ I say, ‘because they are afraid of dischord.’
The Map
We are sitting in the narrowboat, having returned through the dark streets of Reading. The sky was getting pink as we walked back the way we came, under the concrete overpass and the craned necks of the tall, broken lamps.
I paced behind Lucien, out of habit, as if we were in the under. He carried the stickwrap bag with the memories Mary gave us. I heard it crackle as he ran.
I sit on the bed now and it’s as if some part of me has been cut off. I keep going to touch my memory bag, to check it, then stopping myself as I remember it’s no longer there. The repetition starts to get irritating. I realise that I am afraid. It is a dull fear, boring and familiar, and it makes everything go flat around me. Like things are stuck to cardboard and I could hit out and knock them over. Only Lucien’s presence is real and solid. But I don’t want to look at him because then he might see I’m flimsy too. Paper and cardboard. There’s nothing inside me and I don’t want him to know this.
Lucien moves and the stickwrap bag rustles; the new memories jostle. They are full of sickness and pain, and I shouldn’t touch them anyway.
‘Simon, are you all right?’ Lucien is leaning back propped on his elbows on the bed.
I don’t want to speak because I don’t trust my voice. I nod. Then I just say what I’m thinking.
‘I have no idea what to do,’ I say. My voice is flat like the room is flat.
‘Just what you said,’ he says. ‘You will put them together so that they make a line that someone can move along. Like you did with your own memories.’
For a moment I am amazed that he thinks it has been, and could be, so simple. ‘I didn’t do that alone,’ I say. ‘I needed you in order to do it.’
Lucien studies me. ‘It’s strange that you see everyone so much clearer than you see yourself,’ he says soft. ‘You don’t know your own gift, Simon.’
I don’t look up at him as I don’t know what is on my face.
‘Most people I’ve met, inside the Order and out, never ask themselves what their own thoughts mean. Never seek to put them together like that. It’s always just one and one and one, and no one ever gets beyond that, in my experience. But you, you puzzle on one thing and you seek to link it to the next thing. You ask where it came from, and why it came. And you seek to hold both things in your hand and move on to the next, to three.’
I am not sure I understand what he is saying.
‘Do you trust me?’
I nod.
‘Then trust that you can do this,’ he says.
‘If I make a story that puts the memories together, what then? How do we share it?’
‘You tend the plot. I sing,’ he says. ‘Isn’t that how the forecast goes? I will put the story to music, and we will play it using the Carillon.’
The full risk of this, said out so plain, shakes me. It seems small to raise the other thing.
‘I’m not sure I can keep them.’
‘You mean your own memories?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re not going to forget now, Simon,’ he says. ‘Think of all the work you’ve done. We’ve done. Your memory is much stronger now. You’re not really scared of that, are you?’
But something, whether my breathing or my silence, must let him know I don’t believe him. He sits back up.
‘OK, here’s what we will do. You’re not going to forget anything. Not your own memories, the ones that make you who you are. Not these new memories, which are our task and our test at the moment. There are things that go deeper than Chimes, correct? Bodymemory for one. We’re going to use that.’
And then he sings our comeallye and orients it to the line of the river and the Limehouse Caisson.
In my mind I am standing in the amphitheatre. I hear the ferns, the outlines of the tunnelmouths.
Lucien sings a tune and I follow it through the under. I see the tunnels, the turns he takes, the shifts, the corners. Then he stops.
‘Where did I get to?’ he asks.
‘The entrance to Mill Wall Tunnel.’
‘Good. Now sing it back to me.’
I do. As I sing, I see myself running.
‘Good. Now, you are going to hide your memories in mind’s ear.’
I look at him to see if he is joking, but his face is serious, intent.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, for each of your memories, you’ll find a turn or a landmark on this run, and then you’ll put it down. If you want them back, you simply need to retrace your steps on this run.’
And so we start. Back at the amphitheatre. Each turn I stop and I search my memory, and I consult Lucien to check them, and I choose one and I see myself putting it down in the under.
The burberry I place down in the muddy water of the sluice gate by the first cadence of the first tunnel. The riverstone I place next, where the next tunnel meets the river inlet. I bury the woodblock at the start of the comms tunnel that breaks off from the river inlet and leads south.
At each turn, each shift in the melody that tells of a split in the tunnel or a change in direction, I place a memory. A roughcloth strip, a bar of chocolate, a dog collar, a paralighter. Until the tune is the tunnels and the tunnels are littered with the story that is my life so far.