Lee Rourke - The Canal

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.

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.

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.