The Canal (2 page)

The Canada geese were in full cry—as were the coots. I liked my spot across from the flat-screen monitors and superfluous balconies. I liked being bored—I liked what it was doing to me. The word “boring” is usually used to denote a lack of meaning—an acute emptiness. But the weight of boredom at that precise moment was almost overwhelming, it sure as hell wasn’t empty of anything; it was tangible—
it had meaning
.

It was important for me to be sitting on that bench. I pondered this conclusion for about an hour or so. It felt good—so good, in fact, that I hadn’t noticed the young woman who had joined me. I glanced to my right: blue. She was wearing blue. She had brown hair—medium-length and of no particular style. I caught a light whiff of her scent in the breeze: she smelt clean, as though she had just stepped out of the shower. She stared straight ahead, motionless, silent. I smiled.

Two hours later we were both still sitting on the bench. We hadn’t even acknowledged each other—although it was obvious she was aware that I was aware of her. And then,
suddenly, without making a sound, she got up from the bench and walked away, towards Hackney. I remember that this pleased me: Not the fact that she was walking away, but that she was heading back towards Hackney and not Islington. I hold a lot of ill-feeling towards Islington. It’s not my kind of place—no matter how hard it tries. If I was an estate agent then maybe I would feel at home—but I’m not an estate agent.

Little by little, yet another pattern was beginning to emerge in my life. It was between 8:30 and 9:00 in the morning, and once again I was to be found sitting on the bench. This time I was fully aware when she arrived one hour or so later. I had spent the time waiting for her to arrive—not that I knew she would—thinking about the dredgers. They still hadn’t visited this section of the canal, although they had been at work farther down towards Angel at the wharf, and scum and debris was beginning to fill up the stretch between the rusting iron bridge and the whitewashed office block. I had already counted twelve empty beer bottles float by, maybe ten or eleven crisp packets of various description, four or five bits of wood, one milk carton, and about sixteen plastic bottles. Scum was beginning to settle by the moss growing up the whitewashed building at the water’s edge. Things were beginning to look a mess.

I wanted to see them, the dredgers. I wanted to see them in action. I wanted to see what they might find buried in the thick sludge. I got up off the bench and walked to the bank. I peered down. I couldn’t even see my own reflection in the water—let alone what was down there, below the surface. I felt aggrieved by their no-show. I contemplated contacting
British Waterways London, or maybe Hackney or Islington council to see if an emergency dredger team could be deployed immediately. But I didn’t own a mobile phone—I had thrown the last one I owned into the dustbin in disgust—so I was unable to phone for the number. I would have even paid the extra charge and demanded that I be put straight through. I walked back to the bench wondering what I could do with myself. I kicked my heels into the dirt, scattering the used cigarette ends, and moved them about, to make random patterns and then erased them, over and over again. I looked over at the snazzy flat-screen monitors. The same man I’d watched before—this time dressed in a slim-fitted white shirt and a thin blue tie—was walking back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. A lone coot trundled along in the canal below him, its large feet paddling like crazy against the current. The man in the slim-fitted white shirt and thin blue tie got up and walked towards the other desk in his office. He walked in the same direction as the coot on the canal, and for a fleeting moment they were both parallel with each other, heading in the same direction and at the same speed, until the coot stopped and dived to the bottom of the canal for something it had spotted.

I looked to my right as she walked over to sit down on the bench: black. She was dressed head to toe in black this time. Like the day before, she began to stare straight ahead. It was probably my discomfort over the dredger shirking its responsibility that caused me to stare at her longer than I, perhaps, should have done. I was pretty sure that she was aware of this, and I’m maybe sixty percent sure that I saw her eyes dart to her left for a nanosecond. But I could have been wrong—like most people I can be quite vainglorious at times. She could have been blinking.

It is obvious that boredom has existed since the dawn of man. I realise that this is quite a pompous statement—
the
dawn of man
—but I can think of no other way of expressing this, so the cliché will have to do. It has existed in various forms, since before there was a word for it, since long before the word
boredom
and its equivalents across the globe sprang into existence. I often wonder how the feeling of
boredom
was expressed before we had the language to express it. We must have lazed about, much like a bored dog does, making noises: huffing and puffing, sighing—things like that. Eventually we would have begun to feel the same urges we still find hard to articulate—it must have been a very confusing time for us. I’m not sure that many people I know have thought about this before, not because I think on some deeper, more intellectual level—I don’t. I’ve certainly never discussed it with any of them. They’d probably find the subject boring and want to talk about more interesting things like sex and war, or terrorism.

I suppose I wanted her to look at me. I suppose I wanted her to be interested in me like I was in her. But every time I looked to my right she was still there, staring steadfastly ahead—not even the faint glimmer of interest, it seemed.

It was a Friday afternoon. The very same commuters—I could recognise their faces, their bikes, their suits—I had seen that morning, shuffling into Islington and central London, were now making their way back, past the bench, under the rusting iron bridge; past the Canada geese, the coots, the moorhens, the whitewashed office block and trendy, lifeless flats, back towards Hackney and its environs. She uttered these words to me:

“Why do you come here everyday? You never used to …”

My right leg began to shake; I didn’t know what to say. I looked at her. She looked at me. I noticed that she had large dark eyes, a little droopy, cat-like, made up that way, the corners turned up with a flick of eye-liner—I was instantly attracted to them. To her. But this was nothing new, as I was often attracted to complete and utter strangers.

“Well?”

Her persistence unnerved me. I stammered. My right leg shook even more than usual.

“I … er … I’m bored.”

That was all I managed to say to her because as soon as I said it she got up and walked away, back towards Hackney, with the rest of the commuters. My leg stopped its involuntary paroxysms. I stared at the office workers across the canal: one by one they switched off their flat-screen monitors. Some left the building alone, others in twos and threes—to begin the journey home, I guessed, or maybe to the nearest public house, it being a Friday. I got up and headed home towards Hackney as well.

A lot of people have attributed boredom to a lack of things to do—this has always confused me. For me the act of boredom, by its very nature, is doing something. As I have mentioned before, boredom moves me, it forces me to react. Boredom is often viewed as a defect of character, but this is wholly unfair. People who are bored are usually perceived by others as not willing to interact with those around them, or with society as a whole. This couldn’t be further from the truth: those who are bored, and, more importantly, embrace their boredom, have a far clearer perspective on a) themselves, and b) those around them. Those who are not bored
are merely lost in superfluous activity: fashion, lifestyle, TV, drink, drugs, technology, et cetera—the usual things we use to pass the time. The irony being that they are just as bored as I am, only they think they’re not because they are continually doing something. And what they are doing is battling boredom, which is a losing battle.

I spent the whole weekend with them, drinking in the same pub, with the same people, the same faces; drinking the same drinks, saying the same things. After I had exhausted myself saying the same things I simply said nothing. I let those around me say the very same things for me. I drank. I can’t even remember stopping to eat, although I figure I must have done at some point. All I really wanted was to be back at the canal. My weekend was a waste. I wanted to be back on that bench, waiting for her.

It was Monday morning. The same commuters, the same bench. I didn’t care about the time; it was starting to pass me by anyway. I was sitting, picking at a spot that had formed on the bridge of my nose. Picking at the skin, the slight swelling around it. Pushing it in; tracing the bump that had formed with the tip of my finger. Stubble had begun to grow on my face, spreading like a virus. I had stopped shaving, but not consciously—I’d forgotten that that’s what I liked to do, that’s all. I continued to pick at my spot on the bridge of my nose. It took me a while to work out what had caused it: a wine glass. Well, many wine glasses over the course of the weekend, aggravating the skin as the rim caught it each time I tilted my head back to finish another glass. After I had worked that out it didn’t irritate me quite as much.

I found my thoughts drifting of their own accord towards her; I wanted her to turn up. I hoped that my crumbling riposte the previous week hadn’t alarmed her.

I fell for a girl in my class at school. She was called Caitlin Booth. Her parents were from Dublin and she had lived there up until the age of ten. Her accent was beautiful and mellifluous. I used to sit behind her. I would ignore the teacher (to such an extent that I can no longer remember which lesson it was we were attending). I would look at her golden hair, nestling on her shoulders—occasionally she would flick it, or tilt her head to the right, letting it fall over her blue eyes. The skin on the back of her neck was pale, freckled, and her clothes smelled faintly of the chips she had eaten at lunchtime. To me she was beautiful. One day I was instructed to sit next to her when the teacher grouped us all into pairs to work together on some exercise or other. I could hardly breathe, I was that nervous. My leg was probably shaking more that it ever has—either that or it was then that it first began to happen. I watched her take her pencil case and books from her bag. I looked at her books: on the back of one she had scrawled,
Caitlin Booth loves Anthony Lomax 68%
and,
Caitlin Booth loves Aaron Maguire 54%
and,
Caitlin Booth loves Sean Owen 91%
. I could have died on the spot. She noticed me looking at her books; she smiled and asked me what I was looking at. So I told her. She told me that she didn’t
really love them
, that it was just
a bit of fun
. Then she said she’d do it for me. She wrote down her name and then mine. Then she began a multiplication and subtraction routine based, it seemed, on the letters in our names and their place in the alphabet. I stared. But I soon noticed that instead of writing the word
loves
in between our names—like she had done with the other names scrawled
on her book—she had replaced it with the word
loathes
. I had never heard this word before—let alone seen it written down. I remember asking her what it meant: she told me that
it was just another word for love
. It felt like my whole body was shaking. Soon the multiplication and subtraction was complete and she showed me the result: she loathed me 98%. I realise now that I have no idea or recollection as to what her true percentage was. I just remember being elated. That night, happy and madly in love, I looked up the word
loathes
in the pocket Oxford dictionary that I used to keep by my bed. I never looked at Caitlin Booth again.

I tried not to look bothered when she finally arrived: green. She was dressed in green. As usual she slowly sat herself down to my right. This time she turned directly towards me:

“So, you’re here again?”

“Yes.”

“
Bored
?”

“Yes.”

“I’m worried …”

“Why?”

“The dredgers haven’t arrived …”

“I’ve been thinking about that, too.”

“Are you just saying that?”

“No, really, I’ve been waiting for the dredgers, too.”

She released a long, drawn-out yawn. It seemed to last aeons; the whole shape of her face changed. It reminded me of an Aphex Twin video I had once seen that I cannot recall the name of—not particularly being a fan of Aphex Twin’s music. After she has finished yawning she turned to me again:

“I once lied to my boyfriend …”

“What about?”

“I told him that I was pregnant. I told him that it was his baby …”

“Wasn’t it his baby?”

“It was no one’s baby …”

“Eh?”

“It was no one’s baby …”

“What do you mean?”

“There was no baby … That was the lie.”

“What?”

“I wasn’t pregnant … I told him that I didn’t want it.”

“The imaginary baby?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

“I told him that I wanted an abortion … 
Immediately
 … And, because he was the father, he should pay for it. That it, the baby, was as much his responsibility as mine …”

“Did he pay?”

“Yes. The whole amount. The last thing he wanted to be was a father.”

“What did you do with the money?”

“I spent it on a weekend in the Lake District with my best friend. We got drunk, fucked men, had fun …”

“Why?”

“Why have fun?”

“No … Why lie to your boyfriend like that?”

“Because he deserved it. He was cheating on me. He didn’t care about me. He hated me. Oh, the usual stuff, you know. The only thing he cared about was money, so I hit him where it hurt. In his pocket. Money was everything to him, still is probably, I don’t know really. It was all he lived for. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. It’s all everyone lives for, it seems.”