The Canal

by Lee Rourke

  All the staff from the whitewashed office block had now dispersed from the company esplanade where they had eventually gathered to watch the whole scene with the ambulance crew, the RSPB, and the police unfold. I looked to see if I could see the man in the tight clothes and the woman, but they had gone, too. I wondered if they knew who the victim was. I wondered if they had realised it was the woman from the café who had accosted them earlier in the day. Maybe they would never know.

  Maybe that’s the best thing all around.

  The rusting iron bridge had been cordoned off and a lone policeman was standing there, guarding the scene. He had told me to go home a number of times—but I didn’t want to. He stood there. Acting on orders. Completing his task.

  I was sure he was watching the coots, counting the Canada geese, and watching the murky water drift by him. He looked at his watch a number of times. Then he wrote something in his notepad before looking down to his feet and then checking the cordon a number of times; it seemed to be sagging in the middle. He strengthened the knots at each end, causing the cordon to become taut again. Then, as the clouds began to thicken the canal darkened. The murky water turned black like oil and a cold wind began to whip up its surface, causing ripples to intensify into a bubbling, choppy current of black goo that I thought looked quite beautiful in its own way. In the distance, up on the Packington Estate, I could hear a police siren rearing through the narrow streets. I guessed it was in pursuit of a stolen car as there were numerous screeches of tyres and grinding of gear boxes, then it began to fade as it left the estate. It began to fade. Everything began to fade.

  I walked up a bit, past Shepherdess Walk, up towards the tree that I used to climb with the help from my brother. I took out my front door key and scratched her initials into the soft, wet bark. Then I walked home.

  I was hungry. I had things to do.

  - twenty-one -

  I was raging. I wasn’t thinking straight. I looked about, around my feet, in the nearest bushes, for something I could use: a stick or a brick. I picked up a short scaffolding pole from beside a contractor’s skip. I held it in my hands, it was heavy enough to do some damage if needed. It was heavy enough to cause a serious facture, to smash teeth. To inflict serious damage.

  I wanted to find them.

  I wanted their mobile phone. They must have filmed the whole scene, the way they filmed the nonsense with the scooter. They way they knew no shame. They must have. I ran into the Packington Estate. The streets were empty. Silent. I wanted to find them. I gripped the pole tightly. I was ready to use it. I was ready to smash each and every one of them. I looked into every window I could, to see if they were there. I wanted to find them, to find that camera. I wanted to see it all happen again, to see it how they had seen it. I wanted to know exactly what they had filmed. I wanted to know, to see with my own eyes, if they had filmed her slip, her pathetic death. I wandered the streets, the scaffolding pole in my right hand. I walked into gardens thinking they may have been hiding, but I couldn’t see them, I couldn’t see anyone. It was as if the entire estate had vanished, just up and left for good.

  I don’t know how long I wandered there, looking for them. I don’t know how long I held that scaffolding pole in my hands, convinced that I would use it. I don’t even remember walking away, or giving up. I just wanted to smash them with the pole and get hold of their mobile phone, to see the events they had been filming, to see it all from their point of view. To pause the film where I wanted it to stop. To play it back and stop it just before the arrow hit its target. To fast forward past that moment, towards her, to catch her movement, to see her move again. To pause it on her face, if they had filmed her, to keep it paused in her beautiful face. Paused.

  Eventually, I must have just dropped the pole by my feet and walked away, turned on my heels and left the estate.

  - twenty-two -

  It was during the summer holidays. At least I think it was; both my brother and myself were in the house all day long, which was quite unusual—the weather must have been bad that year, that’s the only reason why I can think we were in the house together for so long. In fact, thinking back it most definitely was the summer holidays, as it was just after my brother’s birthday, and his birthday fell just before the summer holidays started. Our parents had bought him an Atari home game console. I can’t remember if this particular game console was the original model, Pong, the one that is now a collector’s item; it might have been a later model. I remember being quite jealous of him, whichever model it was. I thought nothing of the game console’s simple, two-dimensional graphics back then. In fact, despite that it was my brother’s, I found the whole thing quite exciting.

  My brother—who already had his own portable black-and-white TV set—had installed the game console up in his bedroom, pulling his bed over to the cabinet where his TV was placed, so he could lie directly in front of it whilst playing. We spent most of the day playing ‘ping-pong’, our favoured game on the console, competing against each other, game after game after game.

  The small TV screen was predominantly black. The blackness was horizontally divided-up into two equal halves, with a white line from the bottom to the top of the screen, where a crude scoreboard relayed the ongoing score to the players. Each half of the screen contained what I can only describe as a bat—each bat looked like an upturned hyphen and nothing like an actual bat. Each could be manipulated vertically, up and down the screen in each of the designated halves, controlled by players via handsets. Each time the game began a white dot, no more than four large pixels, would appear in the player’s half who was serving. Each player had to manoeuvre the bat to return the white dot, as one would return the ball in an actual game of ping-pong, back and forth, back and forth, until a mistimed return was made and the white dot was missed, the aim of course being to defeat the opponent by earning a higher score.

  I suppose it was the sound of the game I enjoyed the most: a rather dull ‘ping’ each time the bat struck the white dot. After about ten minutes of playing, the clumsy mechanics of the game console were soon forgotten. My brother had become quite adept at this game—and, to be honest, I didn’t mind the relentless defeats I suffered as a result. Sometimes he would become unnecessarily aggressive, though: shouting at me if I slowed down the game, or made a pathetic attempt at a passing shot. He would mutter things to himself, half sentences, little snippets, in varying degrees of anger and frustration:

  “Lucky bastard!”

  “For fuck’s sake!”

  “If that happens again …”

  “This control is fucked!”

  “It’s fucking fucked!”

  He got even angrier if he missed a shot, or if I scored a point, but I didn’t care. The sheer enjoyment of that game was enough, its mesmerising acoustics, the white dot travelling geometrically across the small, portable black-and-white TV screen. I revelled in its simplicity.

  Sometimes, when my brother was out of the house, I would sneak into his room to play the game, setting it so I could play the computer on a medium-paced level. I enjoyed playing the game alone, knowing that if I were ever to be caught I would be in serious trouble with my brother. Once, after a marathon gaming spell, the bat seemed to stop of its own accord. Like it had given up responding to my instruction or something. I lost control of the game all of a sudden, the bat sitting there in the blackness, unable to move, flickering slightly, like there had been a malfunction, a short fuse in the circuitry. Somehow, the white dot had become caught, ricocheting off the bat and onto the parameter wall, or the outer boundary, and back again onto the bat at high speed. I watched this repetitive process before me on the small TV screen, the pinging white dot surrounded by the blackness. When I followed its trajectory, I noticed it was following a perfect triangle, over and over again. I began to feel strangely exhilarated, wondering if this was going to continue forever on its own. I waited and waited, watching the triangular trajectory of the white dot, the blackness engulfing it, outside
it, within the trajectory, the dull ping of the white dot hitting the bat, over and over, flooding the entire room with its elementary timbre, pouring out from the small speaker on the side of the TV. I stared at the screen, mesmerised by what was happening before me. It felt like technology, mathematics, this new stuff made with computer chips and electricity fed into TV screens from boxes covered in dials and switches, had taken control; as if it was trying to tell me something, or give me a code to decipher, in a perpetually triangular motion from bat to wall and back again. I must have watched this phenomenon for a good two hours. It must have been that long, before I came to and switched off the game console, fearing my brother’s return.

  Walking back to my room, across the small hallway, I began to tingle all over, thinking about what I had witnessed: the triangular loop, the constant pinging in my ears, the loop acting out its triangular trajectory ad infinitum. I had never seen anything quite like it before that day.

  The next time my brother left the house I waited until he had walked up the street and out of my line of vision. I watched him through my bedroom window, and when he had vanished from my sight I dashed into his room to set up his games console. But this time I didn’t play the computer at ping-pong. Instead, I purposely set the positioning of the bat up towards the right-hand corner of the TV screen, as best I could remember from my previous encounter of the phenomenon. With the game in motion, and the computer thinking that I was legitimately playing, I waited until the white dot became trapped again, until it began ricocheting, of its own accord, in an elongated figure eight this time, bouncing from the bat, onto the opposing bat, down to a wall, off that wall and onto the opposite wall, and then crossing the screen and back onto the original bat—over and over again, the pinging from the TV set filling, not the blackness on the screen, but the space of my brother’s room, around me, around his things, everything. I must have left it like this all afternoon. I can’t begin to describe how right it felt, watching the white dot’s trajectory, feeling part of it, knowing that it was never going to stop if I left it like that.

  I can’t begin to describe how that simple act of repetition back then made me so ecstatically happy—but it did. It was probably the happiest I have ever been. The sad thing about it is that I wasn’t aware of it back then.

  - twenty-three -

  I didn’t know what else to do, so I walked to the canal. It felt odd knowing that she was gone and that she would never turn up again. Even though she had been dead a number of weeks by then, it still hadn’t properly hit me—although the weight of it all was evident in each of my deadened footfalls. The sun was shining above me and its rays were twinkling as they bounced off the canal. In the end, the dredger had done its job well. The canal looked cleaner now that things had settled—only the water remained; the silt and the shit had all but disappeared. The water looked calm. It looked peaceful, as if it had always looked like that, motionless and quite unaffected by things.

  I walked towards the bridge, from the direction of where the bench used to be, where we used to sit, doing nothing every day, barely speaking, watching it all go by. I stood still for a moment and looked back. The recently erected wooden partition that separated the towpath from the newly forming concrete structures on the other side had been covered in graffiti. Some of it I could read: PACK CREW N1 spray-painted crudely a number of times across its surface, the markings of a territory, like cartographic markings on a map. The rest was meaningless to me, a jumble of elaborately formed letters, some coloured, others outlined or shaded in, all put there for someone to read, to see, to decipher—but not for me.

  I looked up. A Beoing 747 was banking above me, well on its descent towards Heathrow. It banked quickly. It cut through some cloud, slicing it. It moved away from me at speed, far quicker than usual it seemed, straightening itself out and moving farther away from me. I watched it until I could see it no more. The whole scene lasting no longer than ten seconds. And then it was gone, and things were silent.

  I turned back around and faced the bridge ahead of me, the whitewashed office block across the canal to my right. I stared at the bridge. It was the first time I had looked at it since it had happened. It was a simple bridge, hardly noticeable amongst the buildings that surrounded it. Even the canal beneath it seemed somehow detached. Yet, there it stood, connecting one side of the canal with the other, completing everything. The whitewashed office block was urging me to look over. I knew each of the office workers was inside, busying away at things—I also knew they would be there, sitting at their desks, sending each other their secret emails, waiting to sneak outside, or waiting to meet inside The Rheidol Rooms café at lunch. I tried not to look over, but the temptation was too much for me: I could clearly see each of the office workers sitting at their desks, or standing by the water cooler, chatting in groups, or on the phone. I observed them for a long time—observed their movements, scurrying about the office like lab rats on a task. I have never been able to understand the things of work. I’ve never been able to fathom why it has taken us so long to develop a system of existence that makes no sense to me. I really don’t know if this is my failing or theirs, or whether I am somehow unhinged, or different—but the feeling is that I now know something, something blindingly obvious, something they can’t see.

  Before I reached Shepherdess Walk, where the path led up towards the bridge, I noticed the tree to my left. The same tree I had climbed as a child, the same tree I had scraped her initials into that wet afternoon with my front door key. The bark had hardened and lightened in colour where it had dried out in the sun. A lip had formed around the outline of her initials where the bark had begun the process of self-repair; her initials now looked like they could have been scraped into the bark years ago. The bark had dealt with the trauma, the cutting and chipping away with the key. I stood and looked at the initials, her initials, and smiled. Then I turned back to the spot where she fell with the swan, the dead swan in her arms, the life bleeding out from her fractured skull. I walked over to the exact spot by the side of the canal where her head had hit the cold, wet stone. I crouched down and traced my fingers where she had lay. I half expected to find something there, something she might have left behind for me, some trace of her being there. But the stone looked like all the others that lined the banks of the canal. There was nothing, no trace of her, no deposit for me to scrutinise … Nothing remained where she once lay to help denote the fact that some thing had happened there. I let my fingers trace the cold, textured surface of the stone one last time, but I wasn’t really sure what I was looking for, so I quietly walked away. I was close to the water, close to the canal; I could smell it, feel its presence next to me. It was strange thinking about her. The things she said to me before she died. It was strange knowing that she no longer existed, knowing she was dead.

  My bones felt as though they were creaking as I slouched over to Shepherdess Walk. I looked up towards the bridge, directly above me, I knew that I would have to confront the redheaded youth and his friends at some point, knowing that it was them, knowing that their actions had caused her death. I knew that I would have to face them one day. It’s just that I wanted to put that moment off for the time being. I wanted things to settle before I had to go through all that. I knew, though, by walking to the bridge, that the moment was drawing closer.

  I walked up the small, narrow path to Shepherdess Walk and turned right at the top onto the road that led to the bridge. Before it a barrier had been placed across the road in order to block traffic. The barrier looked like it was new, like it had been installed that week. The sign read:

  Emergency access

  DO NOT OBSTRUCT

  I don’t know why but I began to read the sign over and over again, maybe six or seven times, as if I was hoping it would change and say something else to me, before I walked up onto the bridge and over the canal. Directly opposite me, past the myriad office blocks, tower blocks, and cranes, I could make out the top of the Gherkin in the city. I s
topped in the centre of the bridge. The canal ran directly below my feet, maybe twelve or fifteen feet down, maybe less. To my left I could see all the way up to the Gainsborough Studios. I thought about the man and the woman arguing on the balcony, wondering what they were up to. Beyond that I could see the tower blocks of Hackney. To my right I could see past Wenlock Basin, towards Islington and the tunnel. I began to shiver, my leg shaking involuntarily; it was up on the bridge that their actions triggered her death. I inched forward towards the edge, where the rusting iron railings sprouted up from the bridge, erected to stop people falling over into the canal. I looked down onto the water and up through the gap in the railings towards the new concrete structures that were beginning to dominate the area. They had started to resemble flats, and I could see the box-like rooms forming, layer upon layer of living space, box upon box. To the right of this, still looking through the rusting iron railings, I could see a large sign that the construction company or the developers had erected for the benefit of the people passing by on the towpath. It faced the canal and the whitewashed office block. It was thoughtfully positioned, so that it could be viewed from every conceivable angle. The letters of the sign were green—again to denote environmental awareness and progress—set in a thick Helvetica or Arial:

  REAL

  I looked away. It seemed absurd. I looked down, towards the canal. It soon dawned on me that I was standing in the exact spot where they must have fired the fatal shots with the crossbow. I wanted to know where they were. I wanted to know what they felt, and what they were doing that exact moment. I wanted their mobile phone. I wanted to see it happen one more time. I couldn’t rest until I had seen it happen one more time. It felt like I could have waited a lifetime for them to appear—up on the bridge, waiting to confront them.