The river is the river

by Buckley, Jonathan;

  Water gathered between the cobblestones where the buses pulled in, and there was often a skin of oil or diesel on these narrow little pools. Waiting for a bus, you would watch the colours swirling in the water. The colours would always be in motion, no matter how still the air. Where the buses turned onto the road, a short length of tram line had been exposed. Their tyres had worn away the tarmac, and had polished the steel so that it gleamed like the leg bone of a prehistoric animal, exposed in a bed of peat.

  In a clothes shop in the vicinity of Top Church stood three female mannequins. Their faces did not smile, unlike the mannequins in other windows, and their hands were more elegant. The fingers pointed downwards, as if the women were ordering someone to pick something off the floor. You thought of them as three sisters. The mouth of one had an expression of disdain, and her eyes were different from the eyes of the other two. The difference was slight, but enough to give her a furtiveness that was exciting. You would exchange a glance with her whenever you passed.

  In the graveyard of the church you uncovered, under vines and bindweed, a headstone that was blotched with thick pads of moss. At first, all that could be read was a portion of the date and a name: Jean. With a penknife you cut the moss away. Here lay the body of Jean-Paul Deverell and his wife, whose name, in smaller letters, was Katharine. He had died in 1771; the year of Katharine’s death was illegible, as were the words beneath the dates. You would murmur his melodious name, to which the hyphen gave such glamour. You would trace the lettering with a finger. The letters were not chiselled squarely, but were irregular and fluid, as if someone had written freely into the stone with a magical pen.

  The name of Marsh & Taylor, the ironmonger, was spelt above the windows in thick letters of gold-painted wood. The richness and solidity of the letters guaranteed the quality of the things that were sold there. The shop was an armoury. Heavy tools, with blades and prongs, hung from chains that crossed the ceiling; it was dark, and the smell was of oil and metal. Huge bolts and screws and nails, such as might be fired from crossbows, were heaped in cartons behind the counter. But the bell that hung from a coiled spring above the door made a small and dainty sound when someone came in, and it danced on its spring like a jubilant little puppet. At the sound of the shop’s peculiar name, you would imagine an outfitter on a space station: Martian Tailor.

  A pounding noise came out of the newspaper office throughout the day. Frosted panes filled the windows, but sometimes the door would be left ajar, and then a huge contraption was visible, a kind of loom with many levers and chains and wires. It was larger than a car, and almost filled the room. How had it been put there? Parts of the machine leapt up and down in a frenzy, as if to pulverize what was inside it. A man would always be standing in front of it, with plugs in his ears, like a hero of some myth, whose survival depended on his not being able to hear.

  It was a test of resolve to breathe the air of the butcher’s shop. A nausea arose when you inhaled the smell of the meat and the blood, and of the sawdust that covered the floor like filthy snow. Flesh was always being hacked on the chopping board, and you would force yourself to watch, as if this were some form of instruction. With a single stroke, the blade of the cleaver passed right through the bone, to embed itself in the pink-tinted wood. At one end of the shop there was a cold room, like a dungeon, with huge steel levers and chains on its door. Hearing the clank of the levers you would turn for a glimpse of the interior, where huge pale corpses hung from rails, their ribs gaping.

  On the upper floor of the toy shop, behind the counter, there was a door that was set flush with the wall. One day the door was unlocked for you. A large room was behind it, with a high ceiling supported by triangles of black wooden beams. Cobwebs as thick as tea towels hung in the angles of the beams, and the glass of the windows was grey. A café had once been here. A poster, held onto the wall by a single rusted pin, had curled up into a cylinder. On the outside the paper was brown, but when you flattened the poster with your hand you found that the colours inside were fresh; it was an advertisement for holidays in Cornwall, depicting white-walled chalets above a buttery beach and royal-blue sea, with white waves rolling towards the sand in well-ordered ranks.

  The pubs in the high street had windows of mottled and coloured glass that was thicker than the glass in any other windows, so that all that could be seen through them was the movement of dark shapes. It was like peering into a fish tank that had never been cleaned. Sometimes a door would open as you passed, and you caught sight of men peering into glasses of beer, or the brilliant baize of a snooker table under a block of grey-veined light. The noise that came out was the sound of many voices complaining; an air of adulthood flowed out. It was a mystery, what went on in these places, and that the pubs should have names that belonged to legends and adventures: The Green Man, The Red Lion, The Golden Fleece, The Saracen’s Head.

  In the shop that sold record players and radios and music there was a shelf on which were ranged a dozen valves, like a display of closely related species in a museum of natural history. The valves were of similar size but none was identical to any of the rest: some had a tiny tip, like a thorn; some were domed, some flat on top; some had a silver cap, others were entirely clear; most were cylindrical, but some were swollen in the middle, like skittles. You could not conceive of any function for the valve that stood apart from this row of specimens, on a plinth of its own. This singular item was the size of a vase, and inside it was a plate of metal that was as big as a playing card. Perhaps it had no purpose? This seemed possible, because nobody bought it. Until the day the shop closed down the colossal valve was always on show. In the back of the shop, above a low flight of steps, customers stood in two transparent booths, nodding their heads and tapping their feet to music that no one else could hear. They could be mistaken for mad people, or the subjects of some experiment.

  The name of the Hippodrome, you learned, had something to do with horses, and so, for a time, you imagined that horses had once galloped around inside it. The building was big enough: it was larger than the town hall, and the wall at the side was as high as a cliff. Wrestling happened there, and sometimes people from television appeared there too. You could tell how famous they were by the style of the posters that were put up in the glass cabinets at the entrance: the most famous had photographs underneath their names, whereas the names of the others were painted in red on lime-green card, surrounded by painted stars.

  Once a year the circus would occupy the car park behind the Hippodrome. On the morning before the first show you would go down to the car park to see the encampment: the red lorries, with the name of the circus in big sky-blue letters; the wagons, like train wagons, on which were written, in the same style, Lions, Tigers, Horses; and the crane with the high curved sides, which would hoist the Big Top. The vehicles were parked in a ring, like the camp in a cowboy film, and the guy ropes and the pylons were heaped in the middle. It was astounding that in the space of a day the huge tent could be raised, and seats for hundreds of people put in place, and the ring and cages constructed. On taking your seat you would look up into the darkness of the roof, to study the trapezes and the high wire. Up there was where the best part of the show would happen. The clowns were cruel and stupid; the big cats, cringing and snarling at the whip, were pitiful and terrifying; only by the acrobats were you roused to rapture. The woman on the trapeze was an object of adoration: the lights flashed on the sequins that covered her body; her legs were ink-coloured and as muscular as a man’s. You watched her as if her survival were dependent on your attention. It made you shiver with pleasure, the moment when she let go of the trapeze and fell. You would glimpse the elation in her face as she came down into the net. She was so fearless, so graceful, so powerful. Dark feather-shapes were painted on the outside of her eyes.

  It was said that the hotel at the bottom of the hill was haunted by a woman who had been murdered there, and then buried in a barrel, by a man who had been the manager. You never knew anyone w
ho had been inside the building. A long time ago, when the town’s theatre had been famous, film stars had stayed in the hotel. Laurel and Hardy had once visited. Bob Hope and Bing Crosby had been guests. When George Formby was here, a crowd gathered outside and he performed a song for them, from a balcony that no longer existed. Wrestlers who fought in the Hippodrome now stayed in the hotel, but none of the men you saw coming out of the building ever looked like a fighter.

  In one part of the rose garden the bushes were very deep. A high wall stood behind them, and at the foot of the wall was an area of bald earth, a cockpit among the vegetation. The shortest route from the path to this patch of bare ground was impassable, but you could reach it obliquely, sidling through the loops of thorns in a sequence of turns and twists which you memorised, like the combination of a safe. One day, under a bush that was passed by this approach, something stank: a rat, with globules of white fatty stuff where its eyes should have been, and ants running out of its mouth. Many times you returned to observe the progress of its change, as the body shrank and the bones emerged through the fur. The angle of a paw changed day by day: it rose, then subsided. The skull began to show at the tip of the nose. Soon after, the carcass disappeared, leaving only an oval of darkened earth and a sour fume that soon vanished too.

  The paths in the public gardens converged at the fountain, which stood on a platform above the lawns and flower gardens. On the top of the fountain a muscular metal man, completely naked and entirely green, held a stringless green bow in one hand; the other arm was drawn back, and two fingers of that hand were straight, because he had just released the invisible string, aiming at the ruins of the priory. The wide basin at the base of the fountain was made of a pale smooth stone, and the shallow water, in sunlight, created a net of shadows that was full of sparkling lights. But a chemical had been put in the water, you were told, which would blister the skin of anyone who paddled in it. The water could only be looked at.

  In the absence of the park keeper, the bowling green was used for football, in plimsolls rather than boots, out of respect for the perfect surface. Nowhere else was there grass so smooth, so tight, so flat, so intensely green. A game of football was played there on a day in August, a cloudless day, and very hot. At the end of the game, exhausted, you lay with your cheek on the warm grass as the ball rolled towards the gutter. Watching the milk-white ball as it rolled away, perhaps you thought, as now it seems you did: This is beautiful; this is becoming a memory.

  In summer, towards the end of the day, the chestnut trees in front of the priory caught the sun in such a way that the leaves were turned to tangerine; the grass beneath them was covered in shadows of multiple blues and greys, like the plumage of a pigeon. It had the allure of an imaginary land, a paradise, a place of absolute tranquillity. But when you arrived there, and stood upon the shadows, the atmosphere of the place was no longer the one that the sight of the sunstruck leaves and the darkened grass had created. The paradise had disappeared as you entered it.

  The approach to the ruins took you past a row of crab-apple trees. You would linger there, beneath the dark pink blossom, and in spring there was something horrible to see: newly hatched birds would fall from their nests onto the paving stones. You compelled yourself to inspect these monsters. The naked yellow bodies looked like scraps from the butcher’s bin, and the blue-lidded eyes were the growths of a terrible disease. Once you were looking at one when its hideously wide beak made a movement. For weeks afterwards you walked on the other side of the road.

  At the edge of the ruined priory rose the stump of a spiral staircase, encased in rough masonry – only six or seven steps, but enough to make a tower. To climb the steps you sometimes had to step over a patch of gritty black mud, which gave off a tang of urine. The steps smelled of urine too. You breathed the bad air, knowing that this was how the air would have smelt in the days when the priory was not a ruin.

  A rectangular pond of unknown depth, surrounded by a wall of large stones, lay at the bottom of the slope on top of which the priory stood. The surface of the water was covered by lily pads and weeds; occasionally a ripple would appear between the leaves, and you might glimpse a huge goldfish. At an angle of the wall, rainwater drained through a small iron grille; often, when you lifted this grille, you would find a frog in the hole. The frog would never jump out. It squatted in the shallow water, quivering in terror.

  Plevna Road was a street of identical houses, indistinguishable from the houses of the neighbouring streets, but the name gave Plevna Road a character that no other street possessed. You thought of Plevna as a girl of exotic beauty, black-haired, black-eyed; she came from some island in the tropics; she might have been an orphan; piracy was sometimes involved. The first house on the left, as you came to Plevna Road, had a cherry tree that produced immense quantities of delicate white blossom, befitting the romance of the beautiful girl.

  You would often dream of a road called Firs Street. In this dream you would look to left and right, and then, seeing no traffic, you would begin to cross. When you reached the middle of the road your legs would no longer work; your feet seemed to be glued to the ground. Under the strain of trying to move, you collapsed; now a car was speeding towards you; kneeling on the road, you scraped at the tarmac, frantic with fear; in seconds, you would be struck. Here, always, you woke up. Why this road? Nothing had ever happened to you there, and there was nothing remarkable about it, other than the fact that you dreamed about it again and again, and that it was called Firs Street, though there were no firs.

  Alongside your school, separated by a wall that was topped with broken glass, was the Catholic school. You knew nothing of what went on there, other than that the children had nuns instead of teachers, and that they worshipped statues. At lunchtime the Catholic children could be heard at play. Their games seemed quieter than yours; the bell that summoned them back to the classroom seemed to be rung more fiercely.

  To enter the zoo you passed under a canopy that was formed of five overlapping concrete waves. The five curves of concrete looked like nothing else in the town, but within the zoo there were similar things. The polar bears dived from a swooping ramp of concrete; the lions and tigers basked on curving concrete shelves; the tropical birds lived in a house of white concrete that looked like a flying saucer; at the brown bears’ ravine a concrete platform jutted out like the prow of a ship. There was a concrete kiosk, circular, with a concrete counter and a roof supported by thin pillars, and a café with a wall of windows that had as many curves as a snake. At night, in bed, you would close your eyes and walk around the zoo, passing every building, taking every staircase and every path. You could hear, in the darkness, the ripping of the grass as the bison grazed; you could hear the screaming that came from the aviary, and the sighing of the elephants; you heard the leopard, pacing its cage, making a noise in its throat that was like a machine in which parts had become loose.

  The aquarium had an outer and an inner room. No sunlight came into the inner room – light came only from the boxes of illuminated water. It was always warm in there, and everyone spoke in whispers, so you could hear the burbling of the bubbles in the tanks. Freaks were to be seen here: eels as big as a man’s leg, with teeth like pieces of crystal; fish that were rocks with tiny eyes; fish with mouths that never closed, rimmed with needles. There were delightful creatures too: tiny fish emblazoned with dashes of luminous red and blue; and others with long transparent skirts for fins, which moved without effort, like coloured tissues in a current. But the creature that always held you for the longest time was the axolotl, the smooth pink lizard-fish that had gills like frills of seaweed. The axolotl was blind, and you would watch it for minutes on end as it groped over the stones that were piled in its tank; its mouth was fixed in a smile that meant nothing.

  The gorillas had a den in which to sleep, one wall of which was made of glass. It was a special kind of reinforced glass, you were assured. The gorillas could not break it and they could not see you through it, thou
gh you could see them. But one day the male, resting his cheek on the glass, slowly turned its head to look straight at you, intent on revenge.

  In the reptile house the crocodiles lay on a bed of gravel, behind thick glass, at a height that was level with your head if you knelt on the floor. You would kneel to gaze into their dinosaur eyes. The eyeballs were like balls of onyx, and the lids that wiped them clean were like sausage skin. They never seemed to see you, or anything.

  The brown bears occupied a ravine in the flank of the limestone outcrop on which the castle stood. Caves and mine shafts and a canal tunnel riddled the hill overlooking the ravine. Many years ago, it was said, a landslip had opened a hole in the side of the ravine, and the bears had escaped. Not all of them had been recaptured.

  The hill above the canal was where the countryside began, but the water of the canal was unnatural: it was the colour of jade and there was no movement in it. If you fell in, and some of the water went into your mouth, you would be poisoned. If you sank, the water would close over you like oil. There was a tunnel that had a path running through it. One day you walked into the tunnel until you could see nothing but a small half-moon of light in front of you and another small half-moon behind. The water was invisible there. You turned back, and never had any idea what was at the end of the tunnel.