House of Bells

by Chaz Brenchley

  She might, actually, if he made it with his flute. She could see herself lying here in the dark and letting soft breathy music carry her away. Like a child floating on a lullaby. It wouldn’t take much; her body was half asleep already.

  ‘I’m not drugged up, anyway,’ she said, just because it was needful, not because it was true. ‘I don’t.’ Grace did, of course, she was a party girl, she took anything she was offered if anyone was looking; but Georgie did not. Of course not. Georgie had never even had a cigarette. She was trying gamely to be cool about it all, but the waters had closed over her head long since.

  ‘You do now. Mother Mary stuck you full of things. Don’t ask me what. They were supposed to make you sleep, though. Like poor Kathie.’

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Better than she would’ve been without you. She’s got burns, of course, but they’re all superficial. Mother Mary says she’ll be sore for a few days, but nothing worse than that.’

  ‘Well, that’s good news. So why do we need you to watch over us?’ Just let us sleep. Kathie was comatose, and she herself was wrapped in a lovely lethargic feeling, safe under blankets, nothing to do but lie here and let the world turn beneath her . . .

  ‘Just in case. Mary’s confident, but she could be wrong. She’s not a doctor. What if Kathie comes round and she’s really hurting? Webb said someone should be here through the night. And he was falling asleep where he sat but still in a state over Kathie and trying to hide it, the way he does, so I said I’d spell him for a while. And just as well, see? Here you are, awake.’

  ‘I might not be, if you weren’t sitting there smoking at me.’ In truth, though, she didn’t mind a bit. There had been times when all she wanted was unconsciousness, if she couldn’t actually be dead – but not now, apparently. Not right this minute. She was oddly happy, half afloat inside her body, bickering lightly with this boy. She felt like a night light herself: barely awake, barely troubled.

  Even her wrist didn’t hurt right now. Well, there were no bells cutting at it. She thought about that, about houses like this, how she had lain awake on other nights with other men beside her and listened to their snores interspersed with a community of chimes, a carriage clock in the room and a grandfather clock down the hall and the big clock over the stable all out of time with each other and picking fights about it, loudly, all through the night.

  The thought became a question: ‘Why aren’t there any clocks here?’

  ‘Oh, there are plenty of clocks. All in one room, put away. Nobody winds ’em. The captain won’t have ’em around the house.’

  ‘No, but why not?’ He wanted discipline and order, didn’t he? Everything shipshape and Bristol fashion – and ships ran to time, she was sure of that. She’d known sailors enough, and seen all the movies too. Everything was governed by the ship’s bell, which in olden times was governed by the captain’s watch. These days they’d do it the other way around, she supposed: run the bell off a clock and let that govern everybody’s watch. Here they used the bell to announce a stranger, and no one ran a clock at all. Except Mary, with her secret fob.

  ‘He says that clocks are tyrannical, and that tyranny is the enemy of order. He says that time and clockwork are antithetical, that the universe is consensual and not mechanistic. God is not a horologist, he says.’

  ‘Says a lot, doesn’t he? Uses big words, too.’

  ‘He does. Also, he says when it’s time for lunch and dinner. Well, lunch is noon, that’s easy enough. We ring the bell anyway, but we can pretty much all tell that. Dinner is when his stomach says it’s dinner time: which is sunset around the equinox, which makes sense, but this far north the sun’s no guide at all. We hardly see it in the winter, and it hardly goes away midsummer, so we rely on Leonard.’

  ‘Leonard and a bell,’ she said, with an edge she hoped he wouldn’t hear, because he couldn’t understand.

  ‘That’s right. He says, “Make it lunch,” or, “Make it supper time,” and someone runs down to the kitchens to tip them off, and someone else runs up to Frank in the wood. Frank rings the bell to tell us all.’

  Frank. She was here to look for a Francis Gardiner, as well as to learn what she could about the set-up here. Francis might well come down to Frank. If she was going to bleed twice a day, though – if he was going to make her bleed – then she couldn’t stay. Sorry, Tony, but she’d be like a vampire’s victim, ever more pale and ever more frail, mysteriously weaker every morning. Mary would summon doctors, or send her to the cottage hospital more likely. She’d be away from here, anyway, safe and useless.

  Bells didn’t make her bleed in London, except in her heart. Something here took her literally. She ought to be more scared than she was, maybe. Except that she really wasn’t scared of dying any more. Well, you couldn’t be, after you’d cut your own wrists open; it wouldn’t make sense, would it?

  Just to be clear, she said, ‘Not for breakfast, then? The captain’s tummy, I mean, telling you when it’s time, and that big bell to wake everybody up?’

  Tom laughed softly in the darkness. ‘Not for breakfast, no. The captain doesn’t eat breakfast. Except at sea, he says. Dawn watch, sandwiches and cocoa. Here he has a cup of tea and leaves the rest of us to look after ourselves. Or each other. Somebody usually makes up a cauldronful of porridge and leaves it keeping warm. But some people are early up, and some sleep late; you really couldn’t make us all eat at the same time in the morning. Not without sacrificing what this place is really about.’

  ‘What’s that, then?’

  ‘Us,’ Tom said. ‘Each of us individually, and the group of us together. We’re like a hedge: lots of separate different plants growing all together, growing tough and strong and intertwined, marking out a boundary, making a shelter. It’s the new way, the coming thing. Have you ever seen a hedge being laid?’

  No, of course she hadn’t. She’d seen a bishop being laid, but she decided not to say so. Georgie wouldn’t dream of such a thing. She said, ‘No, I haven’t. Is that what you call it? I thought you just planted hedge plants, and they grew . . .’

  ‘No, it’s a real craft. And at the start, it’s all about discipline: chopping back what’s there, cutting and bending the green wood and weaving it into a sort of frame, so that the new shoots will bind together the way you want. Then you can encourage all the growth and variety you like, shape it if you want to or just leave it alone, let it run rampant. That’s what the captain’s after, you see? Something enduring, where every individual adds to the strength of the whole, and everyone can flourish. It’s why he needs the big house; it’s a big ship he has in mind. And this is just the start. We’ll be a beacon, and a seed pod. People will go out from here, spread the word, set up daughter-houses all over. We can change the world. Everyone will want to live like this, once they’ve seen how it works.’

  ‘What, smoking pot and dancing round the fire? I know a lot of people who absolutely wouldn’t.’ She knew a lot of people – in houses like this, mostly – who’d come stomping down the hill with shotguns, if people tried to do it on their land.

  ‘Not that, no. Even now, even here, not everyone wants to get high. Some of us do, sure – but that’s not what it’s about. The captain doesn’t, and he’s our guiding light. Give us ten years, time to settle in. Time to make a mark. Already we’re doing what we can in the neighbourhood –’ ladders on a roof rack, screaming at passers-by: she wasn’t impressed – ‘but we’ll be a power in the land, once we’re settled. People will see, people will listen. And they’ll want this, and eventually they’ll realize they can have it, just for the asking.’

  She couldn’t say so, but she didn’t think she wanted it herself. She would never have come here, if not for Tony; having seen it, she wouldn’t stay, if not for Tony. What did this house have to offer her? She wasn’t some older generation that could safely be outlived, so that the young and hopeful could inherit the world. She was Tom’s own kind in every way that mattered, or ought to matter, except this
one. Which was, of course, the only one that mattered. She was a city girl, he was a hippy freak. Back-to-the-land meant nothing to her, and what else did he have in his gift?

  She said, ‘This isn’t paradise, you know.’ That was OK; she could say that. Cynical Grace would have said it already, but even vulnerable Georgie would work her way up to it at last.

  ‘Of course not, but we can make it a garden of Eden. A guiding light. Word will spread, people will come. You came, all the way from London.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I did.’ I wouldn’t have. Don’t call me as a witness. I’m being paid for this. She’d almost forgotten the money. She shouldn’t do that; it was the only reason she was here. Georgie didn’t care about money, she’d never needed to. Grace, though, oh yes. And it was Grace she’d go back to, when she went.

  Poor Grace. Even this little distance gave her perspective, to show just how mean and cramped and bitter Grace’s life had become. A good-time girl who was just not having a good time: how sad was that?

  But it was still the life she had, the life that waited. She couldn’t afford to get too judgemental about that, nor too sentimental about this. It was an effort just to roll on to her side, to look at Tom more clearly. She made that effort, grunted as her body settled again into a delicious languor, and said, ‘Yes, I did. I don’t suppose I was the first, either.’ Tell me about Frank – except that she didn’t give him the chance. It was like opening a door and walking on by, not even glancing in, never mind waiting to see what came out. ‘But I’ve only been here a night, Tom, and look at me. Look at Kathie.’

  What they could see of her was insensible under the covers, and just as well. Even if her burns were superficial she’d be horribly sore when she woke up. No comfortable way to lie. Grace might envy her unconsciousness; Georgie was happy just as she was, and couldn’t imagine ever wanting to move again.

  Well, Georgie could stay here when Grace moved on. Shrugged off and left behind, she could be, like an old coat no longer wanted. Right now, all Grace wanted to do was move Tom just a fraction, shake him out of his complacency. He was a true believer, and they were dangerous: to themselves, and to everyone around them.

  He said, ‘Accidents happen, in any community. What matters is the way we meet them.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘What matters is the way they happen. What makes them happen. There’s no such thing as accidents.’ She did, perhaps, believe that. Certainly she believed it here. Maybe she was a true believer too; maybe this place made them so. She took a breath, took the plunge; said, ‘How come you think I keep bleeding? I’m not cutting my own arm open, just to be dramatic. There’s something here that cuts me, every time you ring your bloody bells. You know that, you were there the first time. You wanted to think it was brambles, remember?’

  He was quiet, smoking, listening.

  She pressed on. ‘And Kathie, she didn’t trail her skirt in the fire, to have it catch like that. She wasn’t that stoned. You couldn’t get that close, anyway; it was way too hot. Something reached out for her. I saw it. It was hands, fiery hands . . .’

  Now he was laughing at her. Softly, not unkindly, but still laughing.

  He said, ‘Never mind how stoned Kathie was – how about you? What had you been smoking?’

  ‘Nothing. I don’t.’ Well, Grace did, if some man passed her something. Georgie, not. Something to be grateful for, that she needn’t pretend to want it.

  ‘Well, you must have caught a backblow from someone; there’s enough dope in the air here to send anyone high.’ Indeed, he added to it deliberately, blowing out a thick cloud into the small room. ‘Or you’ve taken too much acid in your time, and you were having a flashback. There’s nothing in the food, I know that. We don’t spike people. But straight up, Georgie love, come on – hands reaching out from the fire? Something collapsed in there, that’s all, an old cupboard or whatever; everything else fell in on top of it and blew out a shower of sparks. We ought to be more careful. So should you. How did you cut yourself anyway, the first time?’

  ‘With a razor,’ she said nastily.

  He sat over that for a while, smoking, thinking. Then he said, ‘Why?’

  ‘Because . . . Because I was in trouble, and I couldn’t stand it any longer.’ Let him sit over that. He’d think she meant I was pregnant when she said I was in trouble, and he already knew about the baby. Let him do her lying for her. Lying for herself was far too much effort, with this warm lethargy laid over her like an extra blanket. It wasn’t really lying anyway, if she just allowed him to misunderstand.

  ‘I’m sorry, love. Poor Georgie.’

  She thought he might let it go at that. He was a nice boy; he might be too nice to bother her further. Maybe she could just drift off again; she only felt half awake anyway. Mary’s drugs, or his: she was breathing a lot of that smoke. If this kept up, she really could find herself high on the backdraught.

  Perhaps she already was. She had to be, didn’t she? He did have to be right. Fire and bells . . .

  As if reading her mind, he said, ‘Bells, though, Georgie? What do you mean about the bells?’

  ‘Just the sound of them cuts right through me. I hate bells.’ And then, because that wasn’t enough – his silence said so, and her own creeping honesty, masks slipping one by one until she was almost dizzy with confession – she went on, ‘They let me out for my baby’s funeral, and the bell, the bloody bell . . .’

  They’d tolled a single bell that morning, on and on. Three strokes three times, to say they were burying a man, though he was just barely begun, not properly born even; and then a hundred and one strokes more, because the parish custom was to ring the number of years the dead had lived, but stillbirths counted none-at-all so they did the other thing, they rang their bell for ever. And she’d stood there for every stroke in her foul black coat and veil, and they’d pounded through her like body blows while the camera shutters clicked and journalists yelled questions across the wall of the graveyard – ‘How do you feel, Grace? And how are they treating you? And have you got anything more to say, any secrets to share while we’re waiting? And how do you feel . . .?’ – and she bled and bled on the inside while her face showed nothing at all.

  And no, she’d not been punished enough.

  Still not.

  Really, it had been no punishment at all, nothing but relief when they took her back to jail to wait for her trial; and it was no release at all when the judge then let her go. He was so pleased with himself, with his own generosity, lecturing her pompously from the bench and then throwing her back like a tiddler, too small to be worth keeping; and the baying pack outside the Old Bailey, so much worse than anything or anyone in Holloway; and they followed her home and bayed all night outside her flat, and followed her all the next day, and some of them just kept on following.

  ‘What do you mean,’ he said slowly, carefully, ‘they let you out? Out of where?’

  Oh. Damn. ‘Out of hospital,’ she said: which was true, sort of, almost. ‘They didn’t usually have a proper funeral for a stillbirth – I think they just went into the furnace with all the, you know, waste. But I couldn’t stand that. I’m afraid I made a fuss, and then they made an exception.’ Or really it was her lawyer on the outside who made the fuss, scenting advantage in it, scenting release: which would work in his favour, at least, if not hers. She really didn’t believe he’d thought at all about her. ‘So I did have a funeral,’ she said, ‘and I really wish I hadn’t, now.’

  ‘Still,’ he said, coming back to where this had started, ‘it’s not the bells that make you bleed, Georgie. Really, it’s not. That’s just in your head.’

  Of course it was in her head, she knew that. Her head was a dangerous place. She thought about things, she worked things out, and then there they were: in her head and in the world, doing damage. Hurting her and hurting others.

  In her belly, going bad. Hurting her, from now on in.

  All her own fault, but Tom didn’t need to know that.

&
nbsp; She didn’t say anything, only lay there watching him while he puffed his joint down until he was sucking on the roach and burned his tongue and yelped like a little boy and stubbed it out crossly against his jeans; and she might have laughed but really she was too sad and too sleepy, and she closed her eyes and listened to his breathing until he went away, or she did.

  When she woke again, it was still dark, darker. No smoking-glow, no smoking boy. The night light was still burning, but all that did was define the edges of every shadow, to show her where was darkest.

  Between her and the slumped form of Kathie – lucky Kathie, she was starting to name that girl privately: lucky to be alive, perhaps, and lucky to be as little hurt as she was, perhaps, and lucky for sure to be sleeping so soundly, hurt as she was – at the foot of their beds was the darkest point in the room, just where it ought to have been brightest. Where there was no furniture – nothing to block the fall of moon and starlight from the window with the night light’s glow to back them – darkness had gathered itself together. Shape and substance, all of a piece, physical dark: she could have touched it if she sat up, if she reached out, if she dared.

  It wasn’t the lethargy now that held her motionless. She felt frozen, bitter cold where she had been so warm before; and frightened, where she had felt protected.

  Tom, where did you go? Weren’t you supposed to be watching?

  But no one ever watched over Grace, not in a good way, not to keep her safe. They gathered by the pool to see her swimming, naked and tipsy and look at me!; they watched her in prison, on remand, every hour of every day; they watched her flat for sight of her; they watched her at parties and on the street and in the papers; they watched her for opportunities and for pay.

  When she really wanted watching, there was no one there.

  Tom had saved her once, in the woods, by chance perhaps and all unknowing. He wouldn’t come again.

  There were no feral pigs in the house here, snorting among the leaves, shoving though undergrowth, coming.