by Lee Rourke
I didn’t notice her rush past me; I was too transfixed by the violent spectacle happening before me. But then she entered the picture, standing on the bank, teetering over, reaching out to the flailing swan.
Before she jumped into the canal, she turned to cast a fleeting look at me. I cannot erase that look from my mind. But how many times have I said that? How many times have I commented on how she looked at me? All I know is that she looked at me and if I knew then what I know now I would have stopped her. I would have dragged her away from the canal, from everything. I would have stopped her.
She moved clumsily, awkwardly, like some weight had glued her to the spot, pulling her towards the canal bed, rendering any fluidity of movement an impossibility. She waded, messily, over to the dead swan. Reaching it, she made a final lunge, stretching with both arms out to grasp it, falling into the water, before resurfacing to hold it, the whole swan in its entirety, breast to breast. Then, struggling as before, she waded back with the swan, labouring to keep it out, above the water, back to where I was standing. She carried the swan in complete silence, steadfastly refusing to allow its limp neck and head to drag and loll through the water, straining and overly arching her back to lift it those crucial few millimetres above the choppy surface.
I shouted something to her. I cannot recall what it was, but it must have attracted her attention as she momentarily looked up at me again, just the once, to gauge her distance, as she made her way, slowly, back towards me on the towpath. The rain continued to bounce off her, sheets of it cutting into the murky water all about, trickling down the fattened breast of the swan. She proceeded with a blank stare, as if she was up to something ordinary, something she did every other day. It wasn’t a cold look, as such, or without any emotion, yet it left me wondering if she was acting on sheer impulse rather than an intrinsic need to save the swan—but, as I’ve always thought, aren’t all potentially life-saving decisions made on a whim, without caution, and therefore wholly mechanised?
My brother saved me once. Not from death exactly, but from a violent situation. I was in my early teens and had become fearful of almost everything. I was walking home from a friend’s house in the area. The streets were busy and dark; it wasn’t that late so it must have been in winter. I was walking down the Essex Road, and as I passed The Green Man pub, I noticed that I was being followed by three other lads. They were a little older than me, but not much. Pretty soon they caught up with me, after I crossed New North Road, when I was passing the row of shops set back from the Essex Road. Whilst trying to quicken my pace they stopped me. One of them pulled out a lock knife and held it to my stomach while the others rifled through my pockets and bag. I had nothing of any monetary value, or interest for that matter, on my person, so they began to indiscriminately kick me, laughing and shouting at me to keep walking. They continued to kick me, mostly in the shins and calves, trying to trip me up. I hopped and skipped, jumping out of the way. Then something hard and extremely painful hit me across both shins, which caused me to fall to the floor in immediate agony. I had been hit with an old wooden rounders bat. I was screaming in agony. I am, to this day, convinced that they were about to beat me into a pulp if it wasn’t for the near miraculous appearance and intervention of my brother. He had been passing by on a Number 38 bus and had seen the attack. He had jumped off the back of the bus and dashed over the road to me and my three assailants, where he pulled me up from the ground and, without having to use any force or violence, made the attackers disperse, simply by naming the school they attended. On hearing this they walked away, swearing, grumbling, shouting at us both, leaving my brother to carry me home.
Years later, when my brother was drunk at a family Christmas party at an uncle’s house, he—in the first and only time he had ever spoken about the attack—told me that it was a total fluke: he had guessed the school and had blurted out its name to them. Figuring that they were from the local area, and if he guessed their school correctly it might deter them. On the other hand, said my brother, in between gulps of the warm Guinness he was drinking, if he hadn’t of guessed the correct name of their school, he’d probably have been attacked along with me, too. When he said this he smiled at me in a way that made me feel that I was his brother.
- seventeen -
She waded over to me in the rain, the swan hanging limply from her arms. Her clothes were sopping wet through and I could see the outline of her skeletal frame. Her hair was stuck to her face, water dripping down her cheeks. I inched closer to the edge. Again I turned to look up at the bridge, to see if they were there, to see if the Pack Crew were there, but they had gone. But I knew all too well who had committed this abomination. I knew instinctively that it was them. I knew it was the redheaded one who pulled the fatal trigger. I knew it was him. I turned back to her and held out my hand, but she ignored my gesture, slipping a little, but still moving towards me. Then she began to struggle, losing her footing a number of times and nearly collapsing into the murky water. I moved over again and offered her my hand one more time. Now the bridge was directly above us once more and we were finally shielded from the rain. She looked at my outstretched arm. I followed the trajectory of my outstretched arm towards her and the dead swan. Beyond her and the dead swan, to my right, was the lower floor of the whitewashed office block and the company esplanade. At first I thought I saw somebody there, staring at us both, but it was a large seagull resting on a hand rail, looking into the canal for discarded food. It opened its wings at full span, stretching them as one would an arm or a leg, one after the other, before rising up into the air, up above the canal and over us and the rusting iron bridge, cutting through the sheets of rain as if they were nonexistent. When it had disappeared from my line of vision I returned to my outstretched arm, holding it out for her. She waded closer and then struggled to free her right arm from holding on to the dead swan, letting it rest on her stomach and right thigh, her left arm still wrapped tightly around it, whilst she struggled to maintain her balance on the slippery bed of the canal. Slowly, she began to reach for my outstretched hand. I inched even closer to the edge, as close as I possibly could before gravity could grip hold and pull me off balance, aware of how unsafe under foot the banks of the towpath had become since the rain had started to pour.
Our fingers touched, ever so slightly, but she must have lost her footing again and slipped, as her hand fell away from mine. She soon regained her balance, determined to lift the swan out of the canal to what she thought was safety, all the while managing to keep the swan out of the water. She seemed unaware that it was dead. Eventually, she made one last lunge towards me: I gripped onto her cold hand, near squeezing out what little warmth was left in it, and guided her up towards me and the towpath beyond the bank’s edge.
The more I think about what happened next the more absurd it all seems. It happened quickly, almost faster than time should allow for such things. In fact, it happened in almost no time at all. Yet each time I think about it, each time I run the events through my mind, knowing that in reality it happened so quickly, I purposely slow things down in order for her actions to reveal themselves to me. Bit by bit, slower and slower, frame by frame, until, finally, she is frozen there, in my mind, in time, unmoving, suspended. And then, just then, she is gone.
It is something I would never have predicted, yet she always knew that it would happen. She always knew, she had warned me about it, but I had never listened to her. I felt as if I had never truly listened to her. And if I truly think about it, really truly think about it, these events are a mere blip, a spot on a far horizon. Most people look back and think, where did all my time go? Why has my life passed me by so quickly? But not I. When I think back it feels like I had all the time in the world—whatever that means—and things have passed me by rather slowly. I have had a long life, and surely that’s the point: for things to pass us by slowly? For time to drag? So that we feel we have lived longer? It baffles me why people are so obsessed with trying to fill this time with
holidays, cars, designer clothes, technology, energetic sports, et cetera. Why would they want time to pass by quickly? Why would anyone want that? Those who bemoan the speedy passing of time at the end of their life are surely those same people who tried to fill it up with things to quicken its passing anyway, aren’t they? Sometimes I don’t know why I think about this anymore, but there is still one more thing that rankles deep within me: if I have had all of this time, if my life has passed me by slowly, with each day lingering pointlessly into the next, if it has really passed me by so slowly, as slowly as it now feels, then how come I never saw this coming? This is the thought that rankles deep within me now: how come I didn’t see all this coming?
I don’t understand, but I suppose there are certain things in my life, things that have happened to me, that I will never understand. Not that my life has been in any way exciting or eventful, or even interesting for that matter. Yet still, even these normal instances, these humdrum, everyday happenings that have galvanised over the years into something I can call my life, even these I cannot fathom. It’s like I’ve never been born.
- eighteen -
I could feel her body weight, combined with the swan’s, pulling back from me, back into the rain and the canal. So I pulled her, yanking her towards me, towards the bank, finally pulling her and the dead swan out of the murky water. She emerged and clambered up, steadying herself as she stepped up onto the bank, onto the cold, wet stone slabs of the bank, holding on to the dead swan. I let go of her, as if we’d completed a natural balletic pas de deux, that she’d landed, as if she was up on the bank completely, but she wasn’t, and as she tried to step towards me she slipped. Her feet went from beneath her like she was on ice and she fell sideways. I watched her fall all the way to one of the large stone slabs that constituted the whole of the bank’s edge, a stone that had been there in its place for over one hundred years. I watched her fall, sideways, to my left, still holding onto the dead swan like its life depended on it. I watched as her poor head hit the cold stone slab of the bank with terrific force, cracking as she violently connected with it. The sound of it, of her head, hit me in the pit of my stomach. The dead swan landed upon her, its long neck stretched out along her torso and down to her thighs, its breast resting upon hers, wings limp and half outstretched, the stubby arrow visible through its neck. The blood pouring from its wound had already started to turn a deep crimson as it began to oxygenate with the atmosphere around it. She lay like this, the dead swan positioned suggestively upon her, motionless. I was half expecting her to scramble back to her feet, to jump up, but she didn’t. I watched the dark, oozing pool of thick blood—her blood—slowly form beneath her head, covering the slab as it began to trickle back, behind her, down into the murky water. Suddenly the dead swan’s neck jerked, momentarily caught in some nerve-spasm, and then stiffen, before falling impotent and limp again, the stubby arrowhead poking through the other side catching on the stone slab beside her. She was dead, too.
She was dead. Her face slowly lost its colour and all signs of the life that once possessed it. Her eyes were slightly open; she looked dazed, ravaged even, staring into nothingness, unfixed and bleeding, blood shot and blank, her pupils a dark blemish, blotting out any colour that could be possibly left in her iris. Her mouth, her lips were hanging slightly ajar, as if she’d been about to open them to say something before her fatal slip. Her whole head hung to one side rather coquettishly, or as if she was embarrassed—if one can look that way in death.
In death: she was dead before me, with her swan, its long neck. Her left arm was still holding onto it, underneath its open wings, clutching at its breast, her slender fingers grasping between its feathers, smudged by its blood. It was the way that the swan had positioned itself upon her that left its mark: as if possessed by something, as if the image before me there on the cold slab of stone by the canal was meant to have been captured and scrutinised—by me, looking down upon them, in death, their death combined in the perfect image. The delicate fingers of her free hand, poised, as if conducting the final, delicate notes of a lost orchestra … the music fading, ending, the sonorous spectacle fading into elegant silence. Her torso looked crumpled, resting on its side, the weight dissipating, her t-shirt, clothes, clinging to her slight form, her midriff exposed to the wet, cold elements, her dead skin pale and translucent.
I often think back to this moment, trying to capture what it was—it seemed like I was standing there, looking, simply looking, for far too much time. It was as if I played no part in it, as if it had been meticulously acted out in front of me, there beneath the rusting iron bridge, by the canal and the whitewashed office block on the border of Hackney and Islington, where each borough begins.
- nineteen -
I stood and stared at her blood, at her cracked head. Then I suddenly came to my senses and rushed over to her. She was lying on the cold slab of stone at the water’s edge as if she was about to fall off it and back into the murky canal, the dead swan upon her breast. It seemed to be caressing her openly, the feathers fluttering in the strong breeze channelling beneath the bridge. I was frantically shouting for help, I must have been, I don’t really know, it all seemed to be unreal. It is the image of her blood repeating within me: trickling onto the cold slab, sending me into uncontrollable fits and spasms, coupled with an overwhelming fear that had began to consume me. I began to shout her name. Over and over again, I don’t know, at least that explains the noise that had enveloped me and the whole sorry scene below the bridge. The blood from the swan’s neck had started to pour onto her thighs, soaking the flimsy, yet obviously expensive fabric of her trousers, mixing in with the rain, the murky water and the silt and mud, the gritty detritus of the canal smeared between each fibre. Her skin was still losing colour at a remarkable rate; she looked pallid, almost as if she was formed from a fusion of wax and transparent plastic. Her expressionless face looked set like the image in a poorly taken photograph—blurred around the edges, a little out of focus and over-exposed.
Her eyes were completely dead: two giant empty pools of nothingness, drained of all life and hope, of any sense that they may have opened at any given moment, and everything I had witnessed was some cruel, sick hoax played by my decaying mind. I could have dealt with it if that’s all it was, if it meant her opening her dead eyes at that moment, to look at me, and then to ask me what had happened to her.
We soon attracted attention—a cyclist. He rushed over, throwing his bike down, and knelt down beside her. He checked her for certain things: breathing, pulse, wounds, et cetera. I asked him to leave her alone, to stop touching her, or the swan, and leave them be, to leave them alone together. He took out his mobile phone and asked me if I had called for help. I shrugged my shoulders helplessly, and he immediately began to shout at me angrily. He looked like he was going to throttle me, but he phoned through to the emergency services instead. He called for an ambulance, talking through her injuries and condition with the operator. Then he phoned through to the RSPB and asked them to come and collect the dead swan. Finally, he called the police. I stood there, motionless, above him, as he crouched down beside her. He kept on asking me, over and over again, what had happened, but I looked at her and the dead swan, repeating the same words.
“It was them. It was them. It was them. It was them. It was them. It was them. It was them. It was them. It was them. It was them. It was them. It was them.”
He began to yell at me again, although this time he was a little calmer in his approach, fatigued by my catatonic state. And then something strange happened: it suddenly stopped raining. As if somebody had switched off a shower in a bathroom, as suddenly as that. The rain simply stopped pouring so abruptly, it seemed almost biblical. I walked up to the opening of the walkway to Shepherdess Walk and leant against the new wall. I could feel the dampness of the rain soaking through the arm of my jacket now. And I knew right there, by Shepherdess Walk, what I had to do. It came to me in a flash.
From where I was
leaning I could see up onto the bridge: it was empty and there was no sign that anyone, let alone a group of youths shooting at the swans with a crossbow, had been there at all. Everything up there looked calm and eerily quiet. Beyond the bridge and above the old warehouses in the distance, I could see the once thick, heavy clouds beginning to break, and light start to burst through them, great slanting beams of it cascading down to the earth, engulfing the gloom around them.
- twenty -
The police, RSPB, and ambulance crew all seemed to descend upon her and the swan at once. I watched it all happen: the swan carefully taken off her and lifted up into the white van parked on the Packington Estate. I watched them take her away, into the ambulance, her face covered. I eventually gave my statement to the police. They took me off to the police station near Old Street and asked me lots of awkward questions. They acted like they didn’t believe me. I told them everything. When we had finished I asked them to give me a lift back to the canal. Then I walked back to the same spot where it had all happened. It had been cordoned off but I got as close to it as I could get by the rusting iron bridge and the canal, watching the coots and the Canada geese. The dead swan’s mate was circling the spot where her mate had been hit, nonchalantly sifting the bed for food as if nothing had happened. Then, suddenly, it stopped doing what it was doing. As if it had just realised. It floated there, without moving, on the same spot where its mate had thrashed so violently. I watched her. She was beautiful. I stood watching her until she floated away, down the canal towards Wenlock Basin.