The Chimes

‘Tomorrow I’ll show you what I know, and we will try to fit the two together. Then you can decide how you wish to act hereafter. Tomorrow,’ he says. ‘Can you wait a bit longer?’ Hereafter, I think. A backwards-looking word for time that is still to come. In itself a blasphony. Before Chimes, a voice says in my head, there would have been a time for

‘Do you know what steals your memories?’ I look at him. Because it is a strange question, one that has no answer and many answers. The river of sleep takes memories down into the murk and silt. Night and the darkness take them. Waking takes them, or our own sadness. Or maybe it’s that forgetting is like a spore or blight inside each memory itself,

The lines of wire, someone said, I don’t remember who, used to be how sound travelled. I don’t understand this, as they are not tight stretched like cello or viol strings, but slack and covered in stickwrap. After a while we’re coming near to where Lucien sang the Lady’s cadence. I start to listen for her as we run, wait for the telltale drops of s

Oddments in thamesmud, these memories. Unlinked and unmeaning. And then I put them together in a line.

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.

But for all that everyone keeps them and coddles them, I tend to think most adults wouldn’t know their own memories from anybody else’s. Something in their eyes and how they greet you in the market. At a certain point in your life, it’s like you have to choose what to keep.

A swagman sings the there-and-back of his day’s journey, a song whose cadence closes at our village square. All journeymen, lighting their way through near distance with a day’s tune. Most people won’t venture further than a day – tarry longer from home, and the memories kept there, and risk losing the melody back.

And there is old code flickering down at me to say, , whatever there is of meaning in the letters blinking, and what is it? Bricked high and stretching up into whatever sky’s still left. Old letters blinking and old brick stretching, and my upsidedown mind shifts against my will and a snatch of song buried deep dislodged too late.

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.