The Canal

by Lee Rourke

  “Hey, it’s you, man.”

  “You’re here again, man.”

  “With that battyboy, man”

  “You and him, man.”

  She didn’t seem too fussed by their immediate and abrupt presence. In fact, she seemed to let it wash over her, even when they began to sit next to her, cutting me out, leaning in close to her and flicking her hair from time to time.

  “JC reckons he could have you, girl.”

  “He want you, girl, so much.”

  “He could have you like that, girl.”

  “Yeah, I want you, girl, I want you.”

  She seemed to brush off their crude advances like one would a fly from one’s food in mid-conversation: nonchalantly and without a care in the world, second nature. It was the one with the red hair who started to touch her leg. She shivered. But she didn’t once try to move away. I looked across. I looked at his grimy hand on her leg, above the knee. He was squeezing it. His three friends giggling like the children they actually were—she just sat there. I had to say something, even if that something would pique their attention enough to turn violent with me. I had to say something.

  “Take your fucking hand off her leg!”

  It came out like that. I said it loudly. I almost shouted it. The four teenagers looked at me.

  “What did you just say, man?”

  “What did you say, man?”

  “What’s that, man?”

  “You talking our way, man?”

  They began to surround me. She turned to me; I looked at her. She shook her head, instructing me not to say any more, but I couldn’t help myself.

  “Don’t fucking touch her again …”

  My right leg was shaking. The first one to hit me was the tallest one, the one with the shaved head: the blow came full in the side of my head. It hurt. The force of it pushing me from the bench and onto the ground. Then they began kicking me and I could feel nothing, except each thud as their feet dug into my ribs and bounced off my head. It felt as if the air had been sucked out of my lungs. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t hear anything. Then the shock of blackness.

  Then nothing.

  When I awoke they had gone. So had she. I crawled back to the bench. I looked over to the whitewashed office block: everyone was staring over at me: groups gathered at each looming window. Why hadn’t they tried to do something? Why hadn’t they shouted over, or called the police? My face began to throb. My ribs felt like they had been plucked from me. I found it difficult to breathe but I guessed that I was okay. My pockets were empty and my wallet had been taken. I knew I didn’t want to get the police involved; I knew I didn’t want to get anyone involved. But I wanted to know where she had gone to. It baffled me. I started to walk. Back towards Hackney. I needed to get to a phone box to inform my bank to cancel my cash card. I needed to walk towards where I thought she might be. I figured she might live in the De Beauvoir Town area, or somewhere in that location. It suited her. She looked that type: one of those individuals content to sit in a gastro-pub playing scrabble or backgammon with the one they love.

  Just as I was about to leave the canal towpath I noticed the swan on the murky water. It was looking directly at me. Right at me. Into me. Like it knew something I didn’t. I stopped walking. It came up to me. It knew I had no food for it, but still it came, right up to the edge of the towpath. I knelt down slowly, painfully, and stretched out my hand to stroke its head, thinking to myself that it would shy away off in the opposite direction from me, but it didn’t; the swan allowed me to stroke its head and long neck, like it was a domesticated cat or something. This huge swan before me, allowing me to stroke it. It was the most incredible thing. Never had I seen such a thing before, and I certainly hadn’t had such a thing happen to me before. The huge, white swan and me. Friends.

  The swan came to me. It came to me.

  PART TWO

  - conversation one -

  “Why do you always tell me these …”

  “Secrets?”

  “Yes, these secrets?”

  “Because it’s easy.”

  “Why don’t you tell me anything else?”

  “As I said, there’s nothing else to say.”

  “But …”

  “But what?”

  “But there’s lots to say.”

  “It’s all been said before. Plus, the silences are just as important.”

  “Silences?”

  “Those times we don’t say anything … It’s when we say the most.”

  “I don’t understand …”

  “You don’t have to …”

  “But I want you to tell me things.”

  “Things?”

  “Things about you …”

  “I have done …”

  “Not enough.”

  “Never enough.”

  The sun was shining. The bruises on my face were beginning to fade. Thankfully, I hadn’t seen the gang of teenagers in the few days that had passed since they had attacked me. Before walking back to the bench I had spent most of my time in bed, watching downloads on my laptop, and thinking of her, and when my bones eventually stopped aching, and my flesh had begun to heal, I plucked up the courage to walk back to her. I hadn’t mentioned the attack to anyone. There was no need to talk it through with her—our meetings weren’t about me. At least that’s how it seemed. Sitting on the bench had been a pleasant experience; the previous days in bed had been bliss, albeit a little painful.

  It was on this day, and for the first time, that I noticed she had not one, as I had earlier thought, but two small, inoffensive moles on her right cheek. One seemed slightly bigger than the other. I didn’t think that she had been hiding these from me; I supposed I simply hadn’t noticed them together. I was noticing new things about her all the time. For instance: her mouth twitched when she was thinking or daydreaming, before she was about to say something—or say nothing. She would sometimes break off mid-sentence, abruptly stop for no apparent reason, but such were her words and intentions that not once did this cause me any confusion. She always seemed to have new cuts and bruises on her elbows and knees, little abrasions, bruises and marks. Little things about her began to pour into me—little by little I was beginning to see who she really was. At least that’s how it felt. And the less she said the more I understood. That’s how it was. And her lessness made it all the more terrifying.

  Her skin was beautiful, a most wonderful colour, like freshly sanded-down wood. It revealed itself almost mockingly. I was embarrassed that I hadn’t noticed these things about her before; it infuriated me somewhat. She had told me things I had never heard anyone speak of. At first, I thought she must have been lying for some reason, that she must have been taking me for a fool. But she wasn’t. She was telling the truth, and there was no point in me trying to fathom how I knew that it was, and that was all I needed to know. This had all happened to me the previous couple of days, I think. Just after my bed-rest, when I was still sore with aches and sharp, stabbing pains, when I looked at her differently. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget what she told me.

  “In order for us to continue meeting like this there are two fundamental things you should know about me.”

  This is what she said to me, how it all started, how I remember it, on the bench, the commuters passing us by.

  It was around midday.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve always liked cars.”

  “Okay.”

  “Ever since I was a young girl I always wanted to own one. My peers all had dreams of fairy-tale weddings, money, big houses, clothes, and boyfriends, husbands and children. I just wanted a car. On my seventeenth birthday I took my first lesson. I was a natural … It was easy. I passed the test my first time without breaking a sweat. At first, I used to use my father’s Volvo up until I bought my own. My first car … I saved up all year … A bashed-up old VW Beetle. It was an original, not one of the new things. It was blue. It never got me anywhere. Always brea
king down on me …”

  “Ha! I like them! Those old Beetles …”

  “I loved it. I had a name for it, too … If you want to know then don’t bother asking, I won’t tell you. We went everywhere together. Even if I had to go to the shops or make a phone call, I would drive up to the top of the street and use the phone box, my bashed-up old blue Beetle parked outside where I could see it. It’s funny, I could have walked there and back in the time it took me to grab my keys, my shoes, drive around the block and find a parking space. But I didn’t care. Like I said, I never went anywhere without my car. It was the saddest day of my life when she was written off. The day she was hit face on. She was stationary, parked there, where I always parked her of an evening, when the other car hit her. I still have bits of her, though, like the steering wheel, the gear stick … That’s it.”

  “That’s a shame …”

  “It happens.”

  “It’s still a shame …”

  There was pause in our conversation. The whole canal was extraordinarily quiet. I watched her pull her brown skirt down to cover her slightly bruised knees. Her mouth twitched to the right and then to the left, and then back to the right again. Then she looked at me. It was a vacant stare. It was without any trace of emotion, like there was nothing inside her, as if she was beautifully hollow. And then she continued.

  “Something happened to me last year.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was in a car.”

  “A crash?”

  “Something like that, I suppose …”

  “What happened?”

  “It’s difficult for me to say. I’ve never mentioned this to anyone before. I don’t even know why I’m about to tell you, I shouldn’t be mentioning this to anyone—it should be extinguished from my mind, but I can’t, I can’t put it out of my mind. I don’t think I can until I have told someone … you … do you understand?”

  “I think so …”

  “I hit someone …”

  “You hit someone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yeah?”

  “In my car …”

  “In your car?”

  “Yes, while I was driving in my car … I hit someone.”

  “You mean you knocked someone over?”

  “Well … yes … I suppose so. In my car … my perfect machine.”

  “Was it an accident?”

  “…”

  “Was it an accident? Did you …?”

  “…”

  “What happened? Tell me.”

  “I meant to hit him … I had every intention of hitting him … I headed straight for him … I wanted to hit him … To hit him.”

  “Where?”

  “What do you mean where?”

  “Where did this happen?”

  “Before I tell you when and where this happened please allow me to tell you about my car, the car I was driving …”

  “I don’t know anything about cars …”

  “You don’t need to. You just need to know what type of car it is …”

  “But even if you told me I wouldn’t be able to visualise it, I just don’t know enough about these things … cars … that sort of stuff.”

  “Then I will explain in as much detail as I can so that you can at least visualise something … The car, my car, is integral, you see.”

  “Oh … Okay, I understand.”

  “The car I was driving, on the night I hit him, was an Audi TT 225 …”

  I don’t know why I was so interested in what she was saying to me as until that moment I’d never thought about learning to drive a car, let alone owning one, and people who often talked about cars—groups of lads in pubs and at work, et cetera—sickened me to such an extent that I had to get up and remove myself from the conversation. But this was different. I have often asked myself what I would use a car for—if I could, in fact, drive. Certainly not for long drives in the country, or to visit relatives on the other side of London; such things weren’t for me. I like the distance as it is. I’m not averse to people giving me lifts to places if I am in a rush or stuck or something. I don’t mind that. But that’s as far as it goes. I’d have to have had a really good reason to have bought my own car.

  I’ve been involved in one car crash in my lifetime. I was seventeen years of age. I know this for certain as it was on my birthday. My parents had offered to pay for driving lessons but I told them that I didn’t want them. Three of us were in the car that crashed: me, Mike McCooty, and some lad whose name I have since forgotten. We were somewhere in Epping on a long, winding lane. Mike McCooty was driving, I was in the passenger seat and the other lad was in the back, laying across the back seat, his feet resting outside the open window of the right-hand door, like he was in a hammock. I can still recall the tyres screeching as we tore through each bend. It happened quite quickly, the crash: another car came hurtling around a blind corner which caused us to swerve and brake abruptly, skidding up the embankment to our immediate left. The car—it was silver, that’s all I can recall—flipped, the engine revving uncontrollably as we lay in a crumpled heap on the underside of the roof. None of us were wearing our seatbelts and it was lucky we weren’t injured. All I remember is Mike McCooty laughing hysterically as the lad in the back lay screaming like a baby. It was me who first noticed the thick acrid smoke pluming from the engine. I remember feeling a peculiar excitement: that’s all it took, snap, crack, bang, like that—anything could take you away. It could happen at any time. I remember thinking that this didn’t bother me. We climbed out of the open window in the back of the car and stood by the embankment, looking at the crumpled wreck before us, until the police arrived. The driver of the other car—an elderly lady—was just pleased that no one was hurt or wanted to accuse her of reckless driving.

  The last I’d heard of Mike McCooty he’d made millions importing discontinued Adidas trainers to feed the consuming habits of the burgeoning Indie and Retro markets. The other lad: I have no idea; he could be dead for all I know.

  “I, er, know nothing about them, sorry … about cars in general …”

  “It doesn’t matter that you don’t know. Really, it doesn’t. What matters is that this was it …”

  “It?”

  “The real deal … The car … The car of my dreams … The car I’d been waiting for all my life. I owned nothing else in comparison …”

  “Tell me about it then.”

  “The car? Or what happened?”

  “The car … and then what happened.”

  “It’s an Audi TT 225 Quattro Coupe. It’s a powerful little machine able to explode from zero to sixty in six point six seconds flat. A top speed of one hundred and fifty-one miles per hour. Although, I’m positive I’ve pushed it further. It’s specified in pearl-effect black with a grey leather interior. But the wheels—perfect seven and a half by seventeen inch rims. People would turn heads whenever I sped by. It’s really my ultimate machine. You should see the engine—seventeen eighty-one cc’s in size, gleaming all year round.”

  “Your pride and joy?”

  “More than that.”

  “I don’t understand …”

  “It’s simple: we are technology—we rival nature. We are able to mould ourselves into something superior. Put simply, my car means more to me than any other thing I can think of …”

  “But you sit here every day …”

  “I haven’t set foot behind a wheel since it happened …”

  “Since what happened?”

  “The day I hit that man …”

  “Was it …?”

  “What?”

  “Was it a …?”

  “Hit and run?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes … it was.”

  “Did he …?”

  “What?”

  “Did you …?”

  “Kill him?”

  “Yes …”

  “…”

 
“Did you kill him?”

  “…”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes, I killed him.”

  I sank into the bench. I could feel each grain, each fibre of it beneath me. She seemed to perk up; her back straightened, her posture a textbook example.

  “I got out of the car and looked at him. He was dead. Crumpled. Bleeding. His eyes were open. He was facing me, his blood-red face. It was like he was looking at me, right at me, but I knew he wasn’t … I knew he was dead. And he was smiling. He was smiling. I swear he was smiling. And I knew no one else could see us. And I knew I could just drive away without being seen. I knelt down beside him, I could smell him. I can remember that smell right now … Beer, cigarettes … pubs … I wanted to kiss his wet lips, crinkled and split as they were. For weeks after I hit him, after the news reporters and newspapers had long forgotten about him, I polished my car over and over. I had it repaired under a railway arch in Hackney, near London Fields. Cash in hand, no questions asked. I polished my car. I polished it until no trace of that night could be detected. I became obsessed with making it shine. I awaited sunny days. I wanted light to shine from it. That night, after I hit him, I took a kitchen knife, a small vegetable knife for paring, and cut my arm … a small incision. I let the blood drip down to my fingertips, I let it drip until I felt numb … until I fell asleep.”

  She turned to me. She inched closer to me. We were almost touching. I noticed something in her eyes that I hadn’t noticed before: there was life in them; they were fizzing, intense, real. She looked excited. She looked alive. Her eyes weren’t the dark pools of emptiness and sorrow I was led to believe they were. I could see past all that. If she would have cried at that moment her tears wouldn’t have been silent, they would have been noisy, vibrant tears—tears that mocked anyone who tried to wipe them away. I wanted to touch her face, her smooth skin, her cheek. This incredible urge raged within me. I wanted to kiss her. When she continued with her confession, it felt like I was melting into the bench. It felt like nothing else mattered, like nothing around us actually existed. And then it dawned on me as she continued: her eyes were elsewhere.