The Canal (18 page)

We have never really spoken about the day he taught me to climb that tree. I have always wanted to thank him. I have always wanted to tell him that day mattered to me.

The rain became quite unbelievable. A continuous sheet of water poured down incessantly from the dark, grey clouds above. It was as if the dredgers had planned it, to help clean up anything that they had left behind. But I didn’t want things to be washed away. I wanted things to remain the same. No, I wanted things to begin anew, as if it was my first day on the canal again, my first venture towards it. She could never have realised that this was how I actually felt at that precise moment—and if she did, I know now that she wouldn’t have given it much thought. I often wonder, if she had the chance, if she would have thought about it enough to have done something about our pointless situation? Maybe she would have turned herself in to the police? Or told me that everything was a complete figment of her own imagination?

I peered from under the bridge. The heavy, cold, droplets of rain hit my cheeks, soaking my face and neck. Most of the windows in the whitewashed office block had steamed up, but the windows that protected the private offices of the office elite—i.e., middle management and above—remained clear and intact from condensation. She was staring into the murky water, watching the rain bounce back up from it. Pretty soon droplets of rusty, dirty water began to fall from the underside of the bridge to pool at my feet. I noticed that the towpath had been stained by it, where each droplet connected back to the ground. Every time the clouds above burst, the brown stain—achieved over years’ worth of downpours—came to resemble the rings of a newly cut tree trunk.

I was sitting on the cold, linoleum floor, looking up towards the hole where the water was pouring in. I was mesmerised
by it. I realised that things weren’t as they seemed, that things could happen and change. I realised that things could suddenly begin that you never thought imaginable. I could be imparting wisdom from the present onto the past, as this is how I see things now, I’m not sure; I do know that it seemed absurd to me that instead of fixing the hole my mother and father placed a large cooking pot directly underneath the leak, collecting the water and then pouring it away, down the sink, when the pot was nearly full. They seemed content with this repetitive activity, as if the hole didn’t matter to them (even though it must have mattered to them, as the leak was eventually fixed). They didn’t seem too fussed. In fact, they found the whole scenario quite amusing, my father especially, laughing as my mother rushed into the kitchen every now and again, breaking from her crossword puzzle, to empty the near-full cooking pot. I was sitting by the pot, watching the long stream of water pour through the hole and down, in one constant stream, into it. I loved the sound it made, the perpetual trickle that, at that time to me, seemed infinite. That sound still penetrates my memory.

The leak fascinated me because I couldn’t fathom where it was coming from. I knew it came through the hole, but beyond that I was empty of ideas and understanding, although I knew it had to come from somewhere. I couldn’t understand why all that water would appear from a little hole in the ceiling of my parents’ kitchen. A hole, a crack, a fissure in the ceiling, it seemed to me as if I was witnessing some form of magic: that something was pulling all that water down from the sky above, down through our ceiling, towards me, so I could delight in the sound it made. And then I realised there was no room above the kitchen, the kitchen was an extension attached onto the house after it had been originally built. There must have been a hole in the roof, and the water was being pulled down from the
clouds above. It was rainwater being pulled back down to earth, through our roof, into our small kitchen. This revelation thrilled me.

Where did all that water go to? When my mother poured it down the sink, down all those pipes, down again through the subterranean sewage and water networks beneath our feet. I understood enough to realise that it didn’t disappear. I wanted to know exactly where it was going, where it would end up next, the water from my ceiling. Surely it all had to end up somewhere? Surely it still can’t be continuing its journey away from me? Surely it must have come to some sort of stop? Settled, in some form or other, somewhere? But why should these thoughts, these little, annoying thoughts matter to me? Surely I should let them wash over me? I truly feel they are of no use to me now. No use at all. Yet, they persist, pouring into me.

She was squinting. It looked like she was trying to focus on something that wasn’t there, something invisible down by her feet. She began to kick her shoes into some loose gravel.

“We could have seen all this coming, you know …”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s all so obvious, isn’t it?”

“
Is it
? What is?”

“This is …”

She looked up. She began a long, drawn out yawn, scratching her left cheek at the same time. When she had finished the yawn, which seemed to last far longer than necessary, she looked at me, through me, nowhere in particular, before she continued.

“It’s all over.”

“What is?”

“This is …”

“What do you mean by
this
?”

She shrugged her shoulders, child-like and unconcerned, but I knew she shrugged not out of ignorance, but out of some desire for me to understand. It was better for her not to say anything, or not too much, in the hope that she could continue. Eventually, after taking some time to bite her nails, she began to talk, this time with a little bit more clarity.

“He’s married, you know.”

“Who is?”

“
Him
 … Him, across there, in that office block, that stinking office … He’s married. But not to her, not to that woman, his
colleague
from the café. No, he’s married to someone else.”

“Oh.
Him
.”

“Yes.
Him
. He has children too, two daughters. I’ve seen him with them. I know where they live. I know what she,
his wife
, does. I know everything there is to know about them … With their perfect life that isn’t perfect, him acting like it’s the most natural thing in the world, you know, that’s how bad he is, a walking male cliché. He acts like he’s doing nothing wrong. He swans around that stinking office in his expensive clothes that are a little too tight for comfort, he swans around that stinking office without a care in the world. But I know who he is. I could change all that. I could change all of it. He doesn’t even remember me … We have already met, we have spoken to each other before today, you know …”

“Where? When did you speak?”

“We have spoken before, briefly. He placed his hand on my shoulder … He tried to comfort me.”

“
When
?
Where
?”

“Yet … that moment, the moment we shared, he has no recollection of it now … He doesn’t want to remember,
he has blotted me out of his life … He chooses to ignore who I am,
what I did
 … What I did to change things in his life …”

“
What!
?”

“When I chose to kill his father. When I took his father from him … Has it taken you this long to work it out? A cliché as grand as this?”

“Where did you speak to him, his son?”

“At his father’s funeral.”

“
You went to the funeral
?”

“Yes.”

“
Why on earth would you do that
?”

“I sat on the back row in the church, near Old Street. On my own. Looking at the coffin, with him inside, all alone. The family mourning his death, openly, repeating the patterns and action of the mourners they had observed before them as children. I could see him, the son, ahead, sitting up at the front, next to his wife. During the ceremony, I think it was Catholic, he turned around to look at me three times. I knew that he had noticed me … He must have been wondering why I was there … A friend of his father’s maybe? A friend of his mother’s? But that didn’t make sense to him. I’m too young, too different from them … Maybe he thought I was someone connected with the church? You get that don’t you?”

“Get what?”

“Lone women, with no direction, who dedicate their whole lives to subservience in the church …”

“But you said you both have spoken to each other … That he touched your shoulder?”

“We did …”

“Why did you do that?”

“I wanted to tell him that I was sorry …”

“
Sorry
?”

“Yes. Sorry.”

“So … he knows …?”

“
Knows
?”

“That you killed his father?”

“No. He was too stupid, thinking of himself too much to realise just what I meant. When I think back about it now it must have happened too suddenly for him to have realised, let alone to remember later on. But when I think back … to that moment … It was the longest moment in my entire life. My only moment. The only moment that mattered if I think about it. To say sorry … To admit … So, I was standing outside when he approached me. I was watching all the mourners as they stepped out of the church after me. There were quite a few. I just wanted to watch them. I didn’t want to speak to anyone. I wanted to quietly leave when I had finished, you know? When I had had enough. But then he just walked over to me. He just smiled and asked me if we knew each other. I told him that I knew his father. His smile broadened. I looked at him and after a short intake of breath I just let the words tumble from my mouth:
‘I’m sorry, for what happened. I’m sorry your father had to die
.’ It was at this moment that he put his hand on my shoulder. It felt right,
so
right. But he didn’t even give me a second thought, couldn’t even remember me, so, so it’s all over isn’t it? It’s all come to nothing … Everything is just moving along as it always does, in steadfast indifference … Nothing we do matters, nothing I could ever say matters. I killed him and it doesn’t matter.”

“How could he recognise you …? In the café … Funerals are stressful times.”

“He
had
to recognise me. That’s all he had to do …”

“But … Well, at least … at least you got to say sorry to him.”

“It means nothing if it’s never heard, absolutely nothing.”

I shuffled closer to her. I was happy that we had found shelter beneath the engineered hulk of the bridge.

It was my grandfather’s funeral. I was standing around the open grave as his dark coffin was lowered into the sodden, muddy hole. I was standing with my father and mother. She was crying, my father stoically staring at the coffin, his father inside. We sheltered from the rain under my father’s large umbrella. My brother was facing me, on the other side of the open grave, standing with an aunt. I remember the sound of the rain hitting the muddy earth, the gravestones, the scattered sarcophagi and the umbrellas of the collected mourners present, drowning out the pious words of the vicar. I couldn’t hear a word he was saying, although I knew he was saying something as I could see his mouth moving, forming words. I could see him gesticulating above the coffin. But I couldn’t hear anything. It was useless. It became meaningless. It didn’t seem real, something that was supposed to be the only thing in life that was real and meant something, but it just didn’t seem real at all. Everyone seemed to be acting out their parts, in the mud and the rain. None of this seemed to bother those present, as if they had heard it all before anyway, accepting it all, as if that was how it should be. I looked up at a relative whom I barely knew. She was loudly sobbing. There was something odd about her tears and sobs, something not quite right, as if she was really thinking of something else, pretending to listen and care, her mind elsewhere, hoping it would all soon be over, so she could get back to her car and out of the rain. I looked at everyone else. It was obvious that they didn’t really want to be there. It was obvious to me that they had simply been told to act that way.

*  *  *

The rain was horrendous. It was pouring towards the earth like the soil demanded it. I wanted it to stop, as much as I knew how futile my wishes were. The clouds were darkening further, and the whole canal—especially looking out from underneath the bridge—began to take on an altogether threatening hue: dark, angry and metallic, like it was primed with violent electricity. Threatening. The once murky water looked jet black, like a river of oil. She blew her nose on a handkerchief and brushed her hair back behind her ears.

“I don’t mind the rain …”

“It rains too much for me to like it …”

“All I wanted was for him to recognise me …”

“But … why?”

“So he can see I’m just like everyone else, that I’m not some monster. So he could see that I was just like him … before …”

“Before what?”

“Before the police eventually find me and I’m not given the chance to make people realise that I’m just like them …”

As she was saying these things to me I was aware of some movement above us. At first it was hard to distinguish it from the noise of the rain hitting the bridge and the water, but it soon became apparent to me that there were people up on the bridge. At first I presumed it to be people, office workers or locals maybe, passing over the canal on errands or something, but the voices—there were more than one—weren’t moving. The voices remained directly above us. I then realised that the voices weren’t adult voices, they were too energetic, too excitable. I knew that it was them. I knew that it was the Pack Crew. I just knew it was them. I tried to peek out above the bridge, but it was impossible to see anything. I imagined the redheaded lad to be there, he must have been there, fiddling with his mobile phone, or lighter,
spitting indiscriminately onto the tarmac at his feet. I imagined their hoods up, shielding their faces from the sheets of rain. I wondered what it was they could be doing up there, above us, on the bridge in the pouring rain. I knew they had to be up to something: no one in their right minds, even a teenage gang, would stand on a bridge, over a murky canal, exposed to the torrential downpour, for the sake of it, to merely hang out. Nobody does that. I knew that they must be doing something nefarious, that they were standing on that bridge for a particular reason. I signalled to her, gesticulating to her to look up and listen. She did what I said, understanding my signals and listened for a short while, then she shrugged her shoulders. I put my finger to my lips; I didn’t want us to be heard; I didn’t want them to know we were just below them.