The Cutlery Chimes
The house was a two up, two down, with a garden that climbed the hillside in steps, like most of the gardens on that side of Todmorden. Gordon had lived there since before Wilf’s mother was born, and it smelled as it always had — coal tar soap, and something frying, and under that the cold green smell of the moor coming down off Stoodley Pike whenever the wind turned north.
“You’ll be bored stiff,” Gordon said, setting the bag down at the foot of the stairs. “Nowt for a lad to do here.”
“It’s only six weeks.” It sounded longer, said aloud. Six weeks was how long his mother and father needed to sort themselves out, and no one had explained what sorting themselves out involved, only that Wilf wasn’t wanted for it.
His grandmother had died two summers before, and the house still carried her handwriting — a shopping list held to the fridge by a magnet shaped like a strawberry, the paper gone soft and furred at the corners. Gordon hadn’t taken it down. Wilf didn’t ask why.
The garden was the only thing of any interest, and it took him three days to see it properly. It rose in three narrow terraces to a fence at the top, and along the fence, strung on garden twine gone grey with weather, hung a long crooked line of cutlery. Spoons, for the most part. A fork with two tines gone. A serving spoon black with age that must have come out of somebody’s good drawer forty years since. They knocked together in the wind with a flat, tuneless clatter that struck him, to begin with, as simply annoying.
“Been there longer than me,” Gordon said, when Wilf asked. “Your gran added to it. So did next door, on and off, whoever they were at the time. One of them things nobody starts, and nobody likes to be the one to take down.”
“What’s it for?”
Gordon shrugged, a man long past finding the question worth turning over. “Noise, I should think. Keeps the pigeons off.”
It was on the ninth day, a Tuesday, with the wind coming straight down off the moor, that Wilf heard the girl.
He’d gone up to the top terrace to get clear of the television, which Gordon kept far too loud. His phone had no signal past the second terrace — it never did, up there, as though the hill leaned over and pressed a thumb to it — and he’d stopped bothering to look. He was standing near the fence when the chimes did something new. Not the ordinary clatter but a run, spoon against fork against spoon, quick as a scale on a piano, and under it, very faint, a voice.
“—if you’re going to stand there gawping, you might at least say summat.”
He looked round. No one in the next garden that he could see: only washing on a line, sheets shifting stiffly, and beyond them a house that seemed not quite right, though he couldn’t have said how. Older. The brick cleaner.
“Sorry,” he said, to no one, because it felt ruder not to.
“You’re not from round here.” A girl’s voice, matter-of-fact, faintly put out. “I’d know you.”
“I’m stopping with my grandad.”
“Well, I can’t see you to speak of, so there’s no use pulling faces.” He hadn’t been. “It’s only when the wind’s off the moor and it catches Auntie Vera’s teaspoons just so. My mum says it’s the fence settling. I don’t think it is.”
The wind dropped, and the chimes fell back to their clatter, and the voice went with it mid-word, the way a radio loses the station between one place and the next. Wilf stood a long while with his heart going harder than the thing warranted.
He didn’t tell Gordon. There was no way to say it that wouldn’t get him sent home, or to a doctor, or both.
Her name was Nella. He had that on the second occasion, four days later, along with the fact that she was thirteen, that she had a brother, Raymond, leaving for Canada in the autumn, and that she thought his voice “posh” for a lad stopping in Todmorden — which he took issue with, being from Rochdale, which was hardly posh at all.
The talks never ran more than a few minutes. Sometimes a single minute — a handful of sentences, no more, before the wind eased or shifted a degree and drew the whole thin thread of sound away. He learned to watch the sky for the right grey, to know the flat note the old serving spoon made when the wind took it square, to be up at the fence at the first sign of it; some afternoons he stood the best part of an hour for two minutes of somebody else’s Tuesday.
He never once saw her.
She was particular in a way he found he liked. The serving spoon had been her Auntie Vera’s, from before the war, and Auntie Vera would have had plenty to say about it left out in all weathers to go black. Her school had a teacher who rapped your knuckles with a ruler if you held your pen wrong, and she’d taught her left hand to move like her right to be spared it, and had the crooked writing yet to show for it. Small things. Nothing he could have set down afterwards and made sound like much, and yet he hoarded them all day, the way you hoard something to tell at tea time — except there was no one at Gordon’s tea time to tell.
“What’s your grandad like?” she asked once.
“Quiet. Has the football on too loud.”
“Mine died. Before I was old enough to know him proper. I used to think that was sad, and now I think it’s just a fact, like your eyes being one colour or another. What colour are yours?”
“Brown.”
“There you are, then.”
He told her about Gordon’s chips, and the strawberry magnet no one would take down, and it was only after, coming back down the terraces with the light going, that he saw he’d told a stranger a thing he hadn’t managed to say to his own mother down the phone: that the house felt like it was waiting for somebody to notice it had changed.
She told him about Raymond in the end, flatly — the same flatness he heard in his own voice when people asked how he was finding it at his grandad’s.
“He says he’ll write. Everybody says they’ll write.”
“My mum and dad are splitting up,” Wilf said. He hadn’t told anyone, not even Gordon, and it came out of him now with no warning, as though the wind had worked it loose along with the rest.
There was a pause — a real one, not the wind dropping, only a girl thirteen years and however many decades off, thinking what to say.
“That’s rotten,” she said at last. “Sorry.”
“S’alright.”
“It isn’t, though. You don’t have to say it’s alright.”
He liked her enormously for that, more than for anything else she said the whole of that summer — the plainness of it, that she wouldn’t make it into something smaller than it was.
It was Gordon who gave him the rest, without meaning to.
“Next door used to be somebody else, before my time nearly,” he said one evening, out of nothing, the pair of them eating chips from the paper because neither could be fussed with plates. “Fieldens, I think it was. There was a girl — the family went off to Manchester when the mills went for good. And a lad, older, who emigrated. Canada.” He considered. “Or Australia. One of the two.”
“When?”
“How would I know when? Before I were courting your gran. Nineteen sixty summat.” He looked at Wilf properly for once. “Why’s it matter to you?”
“Dunno. Just wondered who used to live there.”
Mrs Holroyd, next door, was seventy-odd, small, given to nodding at Wilf over the fence of a morning and no more than that. She hung her washing on the same line the sheets had moved on, that first Tuesday, though Wilf hadn’t put the two things together — not until the last week, when the wind came round to the north again and he went up out of habit more than hope. Nella had told him three days before that they were flitting the following week, and it had felt like the end of a thing, the way ends generally are: abrupt, too soon, not at all how you’d have set them if anyone had asked.
The chimes ran their quick scale. He waited for her voice.
What came instead was Mrs Holroyd, on her own side of the fence, not speaking to him — speaking to the washing, or to no one, as the old sometimes do.
“Everybody says they’ll write,” she told a pillowcase, “and then they don’t, and it does no good to mind it, because they’ve their own lives to get on with.”
Wilf stood very still.
“Did your brother write?” he said, before he’d settled whether he was allowed to ask it.
She didn’t startle, which surprised him more than anything else that summer. She looked at him over the fence as at someone who’d said a perfectly ordinary thing.
“Our Stanley? Twice a year — Christmas and my birthday — for nine years, all the way from Adelaide. Then he came home for our mother’s funeral, and we found we’d next to nothing to say to one another after all. That’s how it tends to go.” She went back to her pegs. “You’re the lad who talks to the fence.”
It wasn’t a question, so he didn’t answer it as one.
“I did once.” She wasn’t looking at him now, working a peg loose with her thumb. “When I was a girl — not here, over Lydgate way, where I grew up. There was a wind fetched a voice right up the garden of an afternoon. A boy. Long before your time — long before mine, if it comes to that; I never could place him.” She almost smiled. “My mother said it was the fence settling. I never thought it was, either.”
She went in soon after and didn’t raise it again, not that week nor the next, when Wilf’s mother came for him in a car that smelled of a new air freshener, both his parents’ faces set into the careful arrangement of people who have decided, for now, to carry on as they were. No one explained anything then either. He found he didn’t much need it explained.
On his last evening he went up to the top terrace alone and took from his pocket a teaspoon — an ordinary one, out of Gordon’s drawer, that no one would miss — and tied it to the twine among the forks and the black old serving spoon, low down, where a smaller hand might reach it.
He didn’t wait for the wind. There wasn’t any, that evening — only the settled stillness of a garden at the end of summer, the cutlery hanging quiet, a light coming on in an upstairs window next door, and, very faint, somebody humming a tune he didn’t know and never would.
Listen to my song, Cutlery Chimes here