The Canal (21 page)

From where I was leaning I could see up onto the bridge: it was empty and there was no sign that anyone, let alone a group of youths shooting at the swans with a crossbow, had
been there at all. Everything up there looked calm and eerily quiet. Beyond the bridge and above the old warehouses in the distance, I could see the once thick, heavy clouds beginning to break, and light start to burst through them, great slanting beams of it cascading down to the earth, engulfing the gloom around them.

The police, RSPB, and ambulance crew all seemed to descend upon her and the swan at once. I watched it all happen: the swan carefully taken off her and lifted up into the white van parked on the Packington Estate. I watched them take her away, into the ambulance, her face covered. I eventually gave my statement to the police. They took me off to the police station near Old Street and asked me lots of awkward questions. They acted like they didn’t believe me. I told them everything. When we had finished I asked them to give me a lift back to the canal. Then I walked back to the same spot where it had all happened. It had been cordoned off but I got as close to it as I could get by the rusting iron bridge and the canal, watching the coots and the Canada geese. The dead swan’s mate was circling the spot where her mate had been hit, nonchalantly sifting the bed for food as if nothing had happened. Then, suddenly, it stopped doing what it was doing. As if it had just realised. It floated there, without moving, on the same spot where its mate had thrashed so violently. I watched her. She was beautiful. I stood watching her until she floated away, down the canal towards Wenlock Basin.

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.

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.

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.

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.