Epilogue
The Last Page
It has been twenty-three days.
I am writing this at the kitchen table in my flat on Tannery Row, with a cup of black tea at my elbow and the ledger of my own life open in front of me, the notebook with the cracked spine that I have not been able to put down since the night in the hall. The umbrella shop is open below me. I can hear Mr. Pettifer's radio. It is playing something sentimental, and under it, now and then, I hear him sing, in a flat contented baritone, the first line of a song that I think he has not sung since his wife died. He has been singing it every morning for three weeks. He does not seem to know why.
I will tell you what happened, in so far as I can.
The city remembered.
It happened on a Thursday night, a little after a quarter past eleven. I did not see it. I was a long way underground. But they have told me, those who were there, and I have heard it from enough of them that I think it is the nearest thing to a record that I will get. They say that the bell of Saint Aldous, which had been tolling the quarter for sixty years, tolled it once, and then did something that it had never done. It went on. It tolled for an hour, with no one at the rope. It tolled the names. Every window in the city lit, one by one, like a slow field of stars, and at every window a person sat up in a bed and put both hands over her mouth, and began, quite quietly, to weep.
For three days Veyra did very little else.
Shops did not open. The trams ran empty. In every street, there were people sitting on kerbs and on front steps, in their night clothes, with their arms round one another, saying names. A man in Low Market spent a morning walking from house to house with a photograph, saying, Do you remember her? Do you remember my wife? And at every door someone said, Yes. Oh, yes. I do. Mothers went to the cemetery gates before dawn. Old men sat in churches. There was a funeral in the cathedral for two hundred people at once, none of whom, so far as anyone could tell, had died in the last half century, and the dome was so full of the sound of singing that the pigeons left it for a week.
It was not gentle. I will not pretend it was. There were people who could not bear it. A woman on Marrow Lane took her own life on the second night, having remembered what she had done with a child that she had given up. There were men who walked out into the river. I am told that Saint Aldous had to open its doors on the Friday and take in anyone who came, and that the wards were filled by noon. David Miller was right about that. He is a good man, and he was right, and I did it anyway, and I have not made up my mind whether that is the same as being wrong.
But a great deal of what I have heard is of another kind.
I have heard of a man who found his brother, whom he had thought dead for forty years, in a boarding house in the north of the city, and sat with him, the two of them, at a kitchen table, without speaking, until it was light. I have heard of a girl with a violin case who played in Cathedral Square for six hours without stopping, and a crowd that gathered and stood in silence. I have heard, from James, who tells me everything, that Peter Miller's grave in the municipal cemetery is under a plane tree on the north side of the chapel, and that his father goes there every day at dusk and sits with his hat in his hands, and says, quite loudly, in the plain air, the names of the things the two of them used to do together.
The brass plates have been taken down. They came off the bridges in the first week, one by one, without fuss, and nobody has put anything in their place. People go out at night. They walk in the streets after eleven, in twos and threes, slowly, as one walks in a garden. They look up. There is, as far as I can tell, nothing to be afraid of.
The Department of Civic Memory has been dissolved. The Hallam Building is to be a library.
Michael Brown knows me.
I did not dare, at first. I stood on the pavement for an hour outside the laundrette, in the grey early light of the Saturday, with my hands in my pockets, trying to decide whether I could stand it if he looked at me with that careful face. When he came to the door, in a pair of old trousers and a cardigan, with a paper bag in his hand, he looked at me for a long moment. Then he said, in a voice like torn cloth, "You utter fool. You left your torch on my sofa."
He has been round most evenings since. He has a new tape machine. He tells me that on the night of the lever, the whisper on tape number four went quiet, in the middle of a word, and has not made a sound since. He plays it for me sometimes. We listen, the two of us, to a man's voice on a dead telephone in a room that did not exist, and a girl's, saying, Daniel, it's all right. It ends the way it always ended. But the breathing in the corner has gone. There is just a space, in the hiss, where it used to be.
"I'm not saying it's gone," says Michael, chewing a cardamom seed. "I'm saying it's stopped being a thing that I can hear."
I have not found Anna.
I should say that clearly, because I know what you will have been hoping. I looked. I went to Marrow Lane on the first morning, in the cold, and I stood on the step of my mother's house with the key in my hand. The wardrobe had been pushed back against the wall. The little door in the roses had gone. When I measured the bedroom, it came to fourteen feet exactly, the width of the house. I went into the box room. I found, behind the shelves of folded cloth, a plain brick wall.
Mrs. Ashby came out next door as I stood there. She is seventy-three. She had a shopping bag in one hand, and a handkerchief in the other, and her face was wet. She looked at me for a long time over the garden fence, and then she said, quite simply, "Oh, Daniel. I'm so sorry. I've remembered her. I've remembered the little one. I used to give her the canary seed." She dabbed at her eyes. "She was a lovely child. Everyone said so. Where's she gone?"
I said I did not know.
It was the most terrible thing I have ever had to say.
I have written to everyone I can think of. I have put a notice in the paper. I have stood at the pump house at dusk, with a lantern, and called her name down the shaft, in the clear, ordinary, unafraid voice of a man who has nothing left to hide, and I have waited. I have listened. Nothing has answered. I do not know whether she walked up the tunnel and out into the world and is living, this moment, in some other city, under another name. I do not know whether she went home. I do not know whether she is still, somewhere, a small figure in a yellow cardigan, waving from the end of a very long hall.
And I do not know, God help me, whether the girl who put her arms round me in that grey light was my sister. I have turned it over a hundred times. I have taken every clue and laid them in order. A gap in her teeth. A voice through a keyhole. A thing that wears whoever you miss.
I think that she was. I think that I would know.
But I know what it is to write something down and be certain, and be wrong.
There is one more thing, and I have been putting it off.
Everyone remembers me.
I do not mean my friends. I mean everyone. I mean that on the morning after, when I walked out of the pump house in the first light and came up the long hill toward the tram, a woman I had never met, in a headscarf, selling flowers at the corner of Gantry Street, put down her bucket and said, "Good morning, Mr. Carter. You look as if you haven't slept." I mean that the conductor on the number nine called me by name. That a boy on a bicycle, who could not have been more than nine, grinned at me in the middle of the road, and said, "Happy birthday for Sunday."
I do not know him. I do not know how he knew the date.
They know my tea. They know my route to work. They know that I hum, when I think no one is listening, a song my mother used to sing over the sink. A man I passed on the stairs of the depot said, kindly, "Chin up. It gets easier," and I did not understand until I was on the platform that he was talking about the grave.
It is only a small kindness, you may say. A city that remembers a man is a city that is fond of him. I have spent most of my life in a room in which no one knew my name, and I should be grateful.
I am. I am grateful every day.
But I have noticed that the rule has changed. The more you remember her, the more it remembers you, said David Miller, in his pale office, and I have thought about that sentence more than any other. I have thought: it was remembered. By everyone. Fully. It stopped being what was left. I have thought of a smile in a mirror, slow, and warm, and entirely glad.
I have not looked in a mirror for eleven days.
I shave by touch. I wash in the dark. I have put a cloth over the glass in the bathroom, and over the long one in the hall, and over the small round one that hangs by the front door, and Michael, who has not asked me why, brought me a bottle of cheap whisky last night and a razor with a leather strop, and sat on the edge of the bath and said nothing.
I know. I know what it sounds like. I am a rational man. If I read this on the page, I should say to the author that it is the natural consequence of strain, of loss, of twenty-three days without a proper night's sleep. I should say that there is a doctor in the Saint Aldous annexe who deals with exactly this. I should say that there is no evidence.
But I have a notebook, and I have written everything in it, and I have read it back to myself so many times that I could recite it. And this morning, when I opened it to the first page, to the Prologue, I found a small difference.
I had written it on the first night. I wrote it by the light of a lamp, in a flat that smelled of wet umbrellas, when I thought I would be forgotten. I wrote, If you are reading this, there is a good chance you do not know who I am. I wrote it in a small, tight, upright hand, the way I write customs entries.
It is still in that hand. It is still on the page.
But I do not remember writing the word please.
It comes near the end. It stands on its own, in the middle of a line, in the paragraph about the voice outside the window. Do not get up, I wrote. Please. Do not get up. I know what I wrote. I have it by heart. And I have gone over and over it, these eleven days, and I cannot find it, in my memory, the word that is there, perfectly clear, in my own ink.
It is a very small word. It might be nothing at all.
I have decided that I will not go to the doctor.
It is eleven minutes past eleven. The shop below me has closed. The street is quiet, and obedient, in the way it was a month ago, although there is no longer any reason, and a few couples are walking home through it, slowly, in the lamplight, arm in arm. I can hear their footsteps. I can hear, a long way off, a tram.
I am going to finish the page.
I have put a clean cup beside the notebook, and the small brass key with its red thread, which I have kept, and I have thought, a great deal, about what I will do at seventeen minutes past eleven.
I think that I will not answer.
I have made that promise before. I know how little it is worth. But I have made it again tonight, to the empty room, aloud, in the voice of a man who has learned, at some cost, what he can bear. I have put my hand on the table. I have said: if someone I love calls my name from the street, I will not go to the window.
Because they will. I know they will. I do not think it will be anything frightening. I think that it will be the whole city, softly, from every corner, at once. I think it will come in through the open window, in eight hundred thousand voices, my mother's and my father's and my sister's and my own, warm and patient and entirely kind, like a family at the foot of a staircase, calling a late child home.
I have never been so wanted.
That is what I cannot get past. I sit here, and I listen, and I think, if I am loved like this, what could it cost? I think, it only wants to be told that it is not forgotten. I think, I am the one person who could tell it.
The bell at Saint Aldous has just begun to toll the quarter.
I am going to put down the pen.
I am going to sit very still, with my hands flat on the table, and my eyes on the page, and I am going to say nothing at all. I will leave this notebook open where you can find it. If you are reading it, and you do not know me, that is the arrangement. It is better that way.
And if you remember me, if there is anyone in this city who still remembers my name, I would like you to do one thing for me.
Do not trust what you read below.
I did not write it. I have been looking at it for several minutes. It is in the neat upright hand of a man who writes customs entries. It is in black ink, dry already, and the pen lies where I set it down, capped, and I have not moved.
Thank you, Daniel. We remember you.