‘Tomorrow we’ll teach you how to run in the under,’ he says.
Memorylost thirteen months later
Matins
I wake up and I’m hanging. Up above, the beams of a wooden roof thick with old oil and smoke. The light is thin and grey and blurred, and for the life of me I don’t know where I am. Panic starts up in my stomach and chest like some trapped thing flapping. I look around for a clue in the grey that will tell me what I am doing here. Something lost down deep in the sleep I just came up from. Some word or meaning for the sadness in me that I cannot name. I wait and I sway, and at last an answer comes up out of the riverine murk. Not sure if it is the one I was looking for, but it floats up and it brings a sort of relief. It comes in the sounds of morning. Listen, it says. You are home.
Dry sharp half-echo of coldness. That comes first. Down low to the ground so it makes the distances stretch. Then the storehouse grows up from that — four walls solid and stripped bare like a beat for marching to. Then I listen for the others. I listen for their different sounds, their rhythms. Clare’s clipped tread in its forward and back of impatience. Brennan heavier. Abel light and uncertain, like each footstep wants to change its mind. Lucien? Not yet.
Next I try to hear the water out past the storehouse walls. The boatpeople are already travelling downriver to trade from Richmond. They sing the sightlines of the river and the metre of the tide upstream and down. Their melodies follow each curve of the bank so if you listen close, you can almost see it. Voices low and wordless in the half-song of navigation, a sort of la la leia la that is almost the sound of the river itself. Above that, different messages curl in and around with the small schooners and flatbottomed boats. There are words to these, some working sly against the music’s message. A burst bank at Leaside. A poliss barge moored this morning at Hammersmith to check for smuggled goods. Poppies for sale at Columbia Road. A girl gone missing off a boat down Lambeth way.
At last I pull back the blankets and swing my legs over the side of the hammock. As I do, something clatters to the floor and I fetch it up. A riverstone, dry and gritted — a memory I must have visited last night. Whatever it holds it is silent now and I get it back in the memory bag presto. Bodymemory trumps objectmemory, and bodymemory says, Join the others. It says, Eat, downsound, get down to the river. It says, Night is for remembering. And in a sidelong voice, it says, Before is blasphony.
My name is Simon, I think. I live in the storehouse on Dog Isle, in the city of London. I am a member of Five Rover pact.
I push the curtains aside and go out into the day.
In the storehouse, the embers of the cookstove are aglow and the rest of the pact are there, which makes my heart rise up. Abel stoking the stove. Clare slicing bread at the workbench. Brennan stretching by his quarters. If you listen right, the whole thing has its rhythm. Abel fetches the caddy and spoons tealeaves into the water. Clare pours milk into a copper pot, adds honey, nutmeg. Brennan skewers bread on the toasting forks. We each take a fork to the fire, in our circle round the stove, and we drink tea with sweet spiced milk. Bodymemory keeps us in our places. No one speaks in the mornings, not until we’ve gathered ourselves enough to know who we are and what we’re about. Not until after Onestory.
If you listen now, you’ll hear the steady tread of feet on the streets outside. Jostling, moving fast. People walking to crosshouses, parks, public spaces, gathering to hear and sound Onestory ensemble in public, grouped together for companionship and comfort. We, Thames pact of the run from Green Witch to Five Rover, gather to sound it with mugs of sweet tea around the cookstove, our voices an undercurrent muddy with sleep, Lucien leading. Same every morning. In the pops and cracks of the fire, with the sweet tea and the river moving slowly beside, and with the under calling to us already.
I hear him before I see him. The long-legged walk in from the balcony. Lucien comes in and it’s hard to look at him first thing. When you go from darkness into light, it’s the same, isn’t it? I see his profile first, then the sharp swing of his arms. He passes the kettle to me and I take it, hang it by its hook over the wire that sits inside the cookstove mouth.
Then there’s the ripple in the air that signals it’s almost Chimes. A kind of hitch or lift, a clearing of the throat before a grand announcement. And a question comes up with it. It rises out of the silt of sleep in my head. Not sure if it’s my voice or someone else’s. The arrival in London, it asks, what was it like? I look to my side as if there might be someone there to tell me where it comes from, what it means. But not enough time to puzzle it now, as in the middle of the room Lucien’s arms lift up and with them the first notes of the Carillon. It is Onestory.
A leap of joy inside me, fierce and bright. I open my mind and let the music and the words come. The rhythm as familiar as breathing. The chords sure and full of beauty. Lucien makes the solfege, spells it out by hand so that we see it and hear it inside at the same time. That is how it works. Doh Me Lah.
What happens in the time of dischord? the music asks.
And we sing the right response:
‘In the time of dischord, sound is corrupt.
Each one wants the melody;
No one knows their part.’
Onestory tells it like it’s always still happening. Always here and always telling the tune. Every piece of it just a strand of the bigger melody. But that’s taught too: The part is the whole, and the whole is the part. The way I think of it, Onestory is a circle that connects up the end to the beginning. No before and no after. Start at one point and sooner or later you’ll meet yourself coming up the other side.
‘In the time of dischord, there is no score.
Music without meaning
Knocking at the door.’
How does sound become corrupt? the Carillon asks.
‘In the time of dischord, worship only words.
Greedy is the lingua.
Greedy are the swords.
‘In the time of dischord, worship only talk.
Devil in the music.
Put the sound to work.’
What happens in the cities? the Carillon asks.
‘Sound becomes the weapon, sound becomes the gall,
Sound becomes the screaming,
All the cities fall.’
The answer is harsh and punishing. At the height of dischord, at Allbreaking, sound became a weapon. In the city, glass shivered out of context, fractured white and peeled away from windows. The buildings rumbled and fell. The mettle was bent and twisted out of tune. The water in the river stood in a single wave that never toppled. What happened to the people? The people were blinded and deafened. The people died. The bridge between Bankside and Paul’s shook and stirred, or so they say. The people ran but never fast enough. After Allbreaking, only the pure of heart and hearing were left. They dwelled in the cities. They waited for order; they waited for a new harmony.