The Canal (13 page)

As usual, I didn’t really know what to do, or what I was doing. The obvious thing, the thing that most people would have done, was either to have kept the purse and its contents, or to have handed it over to the police to sort out its recovery. I had done neither. I was outside the owner’s house, staring in through her window, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. But it wasn’t enough, I had to do something more. I peered into the front garden, which was neat and well-kept. There was a garden/basement flat to the property that I hadn’t noticed from the other side of the road. The blinds were open and I could see directly into what was a bedroom. A man was lying on his bed—half naked—he was a bit fat and extremely hirsute. I looked back up to her window directly above him—it was in stark contrast. I wondered if they knew each other, whether they exchanged
pleasantries each time they bumped into each other in the communal garden path, or in the street. I doubt they ever did. He didn’t look like the sort, and I already knew she wasn’t.

It was at that moment that a man appeared from the house next door. He was dressed in expensive designer casual-wear. His garments were garish and tacky: over-the-top lapels on his jacket, a bright polo shirt underneath, the collars turned up, skinny trousers, so skinny it was a wonder he could move.

“Excuse me!”

“Yes …”

“EXCUSE ME! What are you doing just standing outside this house?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I’ve been watching you for the past twenty minutes. You have been acting suspiciously …”

“
No I’ve not
.”

“
Yes you have
. I’ve been watching you.”

“Well, I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of any law against me standing here in the street …”

“Don’t take the piss!”

“I’m not.”

“Listen, just be on your way, okay!”

“On my way where?”

“Wherever it is you want to go. Just not here.”

“But I want to stand here.”

“You can’t stand here.”

“Yes I can.”

While he said all this he was walking towards me. Then he suddenly slipped and fell over. He looked in considerable pain. I helped him back to his feet. It must have really hurt him because he remained quiet. Then he turned away and began to slowly walk back into his house next door. When
he got to his front door he turned back towards me and stared for a long time before saying one last exasperated thing to me.

“Just go away!”

Just go away? Where? Where did he want me to go? I was outside her flat for a reason: I had her purse, her money. I was in the one place I should have been at that exact moment. There was nowhere I could have been going to—I couldn’t go back to my flat or the canal now that I knew where she lived. I had
just cause
, I had something to do, a purpose. Where else could I go? Where did he think I could just potter off to?

I moved closer and looked into her flat through the window, rising up on my toes to get a better look. She was definitely in there; it was definitely her, reading, curled up on her own sofa, in her own home. The milky, honeyed glow surrounded her. I wanted her to look up and notice me, so that I didn’t have to keep straining, stretching up on to my tiptoes. She seemed to be completely engrossed in whatever it was she was reading. I was aware that there was some rustling in the privets down by the small driveway into the property. At first I didn’t want to look—as tempting as it was—because I didn’t want to lose sight of her, though eventually I did shift my gaze. I couldn’t really make out what it was to begin with but I soon figured that it must have been a fox, or a large rat. Then I saw it: the smallest fox I had ever seen. At least I thought it was a fox. It had lost all of its fur and looked quite alien-like, its once bushy tail nothing more than a brown, leathery, thin whip-like thing. It was eating something that looked like a discarded chicken wing. When the fox eventually noticed me it stopped eating and simply looked up at me—a few seconds, if that—before it picked the chicken wing up and trotted off through a gap in a wall by the side of the house.
When I looked back up, the curtains had been drawn and I couldn’t see into her flat anymore. I began to panic a little. I paced up and down, muttering to myself. I wanted to throw something at her window: a bud from a tree, a stone, something that would attract her attention enough to reopen the curtains, long enough to peek outside and see me. I began to walk away, towards Englefield Road, but I soon turned back and stood outside her flat again. The neighbour was at his window, staring over to me. He gesticulated to me that he was about to phone the police. I shrugged. I knew that his efforts to disperse me were futile, and the last thing someone like him would want would be to have the police involved. I hadn’t done anything wrong for a start and he knew it. He was trying to threaten me, to appeal to what he thought might be one of my fears. In fact, the only person who had done anything remotely threatening was him, when he confronted me in the street. He was acting out of sheer vanity, ego, and embarrassment. He was a fool. He knew all too well that his actions were over the top and erratic. There was nothing he could really do. I ignored him and turned back to her window. Nothing. No lights, no movement, nothing. Not even a quiver of movement behind the curtains as if she might have been spying on me through them. The whole house was now bathed in a dark, almost menacing hue. Everything seemed closed off to me, it all seemed distant. Her life lay behind those curtains, all of it, every last morsel, all of it contained within the walls inside. There was nothing I could do. Nothing.

So I stood there, outside her flat, the two plane trees and the old print works behind me. I could have been there for hours, it didn’t bother me. I wasn’t interested in time, I was interested in her. I was interested in getting to her. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t get to her. I didn’t know how to. Walking up to her door and simply knocking on it until
she appeared wouldn’t have been enough. It wouldn’t have been enough.

De Beauvoir Road was quiet, except for the distant furore of a group of lads walking down Englefield Road, up ahead in the direction of Kingsland Road. It was a comforting racket, it made me feel warm and happy. I couldn’t recall the last time I had walked drunkenly down the street with a group of friends, arm in arm, staggering, singing, and happy. I looked off to where De Beauvoir Road joined up with Englefield Road, by the small roundabout, as the group of lads were passing. I could see there were six of them in total. Two of them were wearing Arsenal Football Club shirts—they must have been warmed by the booze, as it was quite cold to be wearing just a football shirt. They must have been to the match, I figured. I had lost track of the time. I suddenly realised that before I started walking to the canal I would have known whom Arsenal would have been playing, because I was interested in things like that back then. Things like football matches back then actually mattered to me. The days following my first encounter with the bench and with her could never be the same. I was distinctly aware of this. Standing there back under the plane trees, it rattled inside me like something loose within a wind-up clock. Some cog or regulator that had somehow worked itself free from the rest of the tightly tuned mechanism, yet still not integral enough to bring things to a halt.

Little by little, it began to dawn on me that my actions were proving to be quite futile. I was caught inside something that I didn’t quite understand. The very fact that I was standing outside her flat in the street was testament to this. The thought that she probably wouldn’t have cared if she had known I was there was proof enough. But there I remained, outside her flat. My eyes felt heavy and I strained to keep them open. I folded my arms and leaned back
against one of the plane trees. All that concerned me that night was her presence, behind those curtains—the eeriness that I somehow felt close to her.

I must have fallen asleep, as when I next looked up the streets were deserted and there was no sound whatsoever, not even the sound of traffic in the distance, or an aircraft or helicopter overhead. It must have been the early hours in the morning. It was a miracle I hadn’t fallen over. I was cold. Maybe it was around three or four a.m., I don’t know. How could I have fallen asleep? It didn’t quite add up. I was standing up, for a start. Surely people would have walked past me and disturbed my slumber? I couldn’t believe that I had fallen asleep, but I realise that I must have done. I looked up to her window. All the lights were on—not just the reading lamp, all of the lights—in every room. Her curtains were wide open and she was standing there, at her window, looking directly at me. I shivered with fright. She looked like a ghost: ghoulish and vacant. It took a moment to sink in: she was completely naked. I began to shake quite uncontrollably. I should have walked away, but I didn’t. I walked towards her flat instead. As I walked towards her she put her hand on the windowpane, palm out, her fingers spread. I tried to ignore her medium-sized breasts and thin strip of pubic hair but I couldn’t. I needed to get inside of her flat. Inside her. I opened the wrought-iron gate and walked into the small garden. All the basement lights were out, only the fierce light from her window poured down upon me—the shadow cast from her naked, stoic form spread itself suggestively up towards the neighbour’s wall at an obtuse angle, darting outwards, past me, through me. I
looked up to her silhouette above me, hanging over me, as I walked up the steps to her front door. My skin felt like it was bubbling. I began to sweat, it poured down my forehead, and down the small of my back, I was completely and utterly outside of myself. I banged on her door, I shouted out to her. But she wasn’t there. I stepped back, retreating back down a couple of steps. The curtains were firmly shut. It was as if she had not been there at all, at the window, staring at me—but she had. I saw her, I’d looked into her eyes. I knew that I hadn’t been hallucinating, that I wasn’t insane. I stepped back up to her door and began to thump it again. This time I shouted her name—or what I understood to be her name, the name I had found on the business card in her purse. I shouted this name over and over again. Nothing. My voice echoed in the street. Eventually, a dog started to bark in the distance. I knocked on her door three more times before walking away. I held her purse in my hand; I wanted to hand it to her, to make sure that it was returned to her safely.

I crossed the road and stood back under the street lamp between the two large plane trees. I began to think about what I should do next while looking at the peeling, textured bark on the plane tree to my immediate left. I didn’t want to do it but something compelled me to walk back up to her front door. I began, as I re-crossed De Beauvoir Road, to contemplate making contact with her. I had two choices: either smash the door down or keep banging until she reappeared. I chose neither. I realised my actions were futile, so I posted her purse through her letter box—its contents intact—and walked away, back to my flat, trembling and in silence.

It happened on the following morning: I caught the elongated drone of jet engines whining down into gear, Pratt & Whitney PW 4062 twin turbofans, slowing down into an elongated yowl, like a yawn. I looked up to see the Boeing 767-200s hanging there in the grey sky above me like a still life, motionless—a nanosecond of beauty before it began to move again. It was a sight I have never tired of seeing, only this time it made me feel dizzy, like I was about to fall from a ladder, or how I imagined it to be walking over an unsafe bridge without a handrail. Everything, including me, was in the grip of gravity, everything was being pulled down downwards a dense centre, towards our centre, while this Boeing 767-200s, hanging up there in the grey sky above me, seemed, if only for a fleeting moment at least, to be purposely defying all that. It was odd that such a plane—basically, a hunk of metal—should be up there above me as the American Airlines’ Boeing 767-200s were usually used for American internal flights only, from Boston to L.A.—that sort of thing. It was as if it was lost, or had been blown off course, caught, a lone twin engine staggering across the Atlantic, all 48.51 metres of it. Again, I thought of each plane hitting the first and then the second tower of the World Trade Center all those years ago: the first, a Boeing 767-223ER, crashed into the north tower killing all ninety-two people on board, the second, a Boeing 767-222 crashed into the south tower, killing all sixty-five people on board. I wondered how many people were sitting on board the Boeing 767-200s above me. I wondered who they might be, what they could see. The whole of London was a sprawling mass below. I wondered what they might have been thinking about, at that moment, up above me. I wondered if they could feel gravity’s pull—like I could.

My moment with the Boeing 767-200s was broken by its twin engines slowing down again, both engines as big as those used on 747s, howling across the grey sky. Things began to start moving again, as the bulk of the aircraft floated across my line of vision, arching, banking above the city and the canal. I watched as it continued across the grey sky, like I had done so many times before, as it followed the Thames below, westwards towards Heathrow. Its fuselage looked like a shark—they always do—the grey sky like the water’s surface up above it, the shark heading towards its prey. The pilots in the cockpit monitoring each movement and each minute reaction to the air currents and thermal pockets up there, preparing for their landing procedures, the same routine acted out each day, each flight, simulated and real, above the skies of London—a continued defeat of gravity.

Pretty soon another plane, an Airbus A320, appeared where the first had floated into view, above the city, slightly to the left of the previous plane’s flight path. I watched this one, too. It felt like I could do this all day long, until the flight paths changed for the evening. I wasn’t sure if anyone else felt quite like this, but I really hoped there was someone who did. The thought, the same thought, of spotting a plane at that precise moment: the moment it is free, stationary, free from gravity’s centrifugal pull.