The Canal (15 page)

I watched as they reached the rusting iron bridge, finding the submerged scooter with no trouble at all. They attached the small on-board crane to it, and the mechanised arm lifted the scooter out from the murky water with considerable ease, separating it from the mud and shit and discarded plastic bags clinging to its handlebars and wheels. It looked like a monster from the deep, like it was about to come back to life and terrorise us all. The dredger team lifted it onto their barge and looked it over, pleased with their find, hoping that it could somehow be salvaged.

I stood by the wall, where the bench used to be. I watched the dredger. It was called
The Ducketts
. I had no idea what that meant, but I liked the name nonetheless. I wasn’t aware, until that moment, that dredgers had official names, much like a train or a civil aircraft. It had a blue cabin at the far end, with a large lowered deck for the retrieval of debris, its outer rim flat so the operators could walk around it. At the opposite end to the blue cabin was the crane that was used to lift heavier things that had become embedded in the slutch up and out of the water. The dredger was near-filled to capacity, and I remember
thinking that it was a real feat of engineering that such an awkward looking piece of machinery could actually float.

I had been waiting for this pathetic moment since I first walked away to my bench, and even though the dredger had finally appeared I still didn’t feel that everything I wanted—the cleaning of the muck and slutch and filth around me—would ever happen. Nothing appeared. All this waiting. Nothing but here. Endless here.

Again, I put my head up to the wall to look down along it, to follow its line, this time with my left eye, towards Hackney. That’s how I saw her appear, walking towards me. She was looking up at the sheer size of the wall, looking up at it as she walked along. Slowly. She seemed in a trance, enveloped in a thick miasma. It was as if she was expecting every minute detail of the new structure, every workman’s nail, every angle and board. I watched her all the way, my head resting on the cold wood, all the way to me—or where the bench, our bench used to be. She traced her fingertips along the smooth surface of the wood. She was still caressing it when she finally stopped beside me.

“It’s all gone then …?”

She uttered these words quietly. I knew instantly what it was she actually meant. Our space had shifted. We felt uncomfortable. Awkward and mawkish. We felt exposed. Revealed. I drew my eyes up to look at her fully, lifting my head back off the wall. I felt embarrassed. I answered her.

“They’ve put it up because of us …”

She ignored me, staring up at the wall; then turning to look over to the whitewashed office block … before eventually turning back to me.

“This is no good.”

“What? Here?”

“Yes.
Here
. It’s no good anymore.”

“Well, shall we go and get something to eat? I know a café not far from here.”

“Yes. I know you do. Okay then.”

“Pardon?”

“
The café
.”

I was quietly surprised by her answer. My legs felt like lead. I tried to say something to her. I tried to say, “I’ve been waiting for this …” But I somehow couldn’t form the correct movements and positions with my mouth, it opened, but simply wouldn’t do anything. Nothing seemed to work. Eventually I managed to mutter, “Yes.”

So we walked along the towpath. Towards Islington. Towards the Café. The Rheidol Rooms. I felt like an automaton walking along with her. I remember gliding along like I was a machine on autopilot. Like it had all been preprogrammed pre-route.

As we walked along the towpath a gaggle of Canada geese joined us, paddling alongside at exactly the same pace, their heads bobbing back and forth in motion. There were seven in total. I counted each one to make sure. Then I noticed that one of them wasn’t a Canada goose at all; it was a smaller, stockier breed, sporting a bright orange bill. She, or he, looked happy, not caring about being different, not bothering about its individuality, happily paddling along. They continued alongside us until we reached Wenlock Basin, where they turned left, away from us, towards a
group of people eating sandwiches by a bench below the expensive flats on the other side of the basin.

We walked in silence. I was thinking about the wall, about what they were building on this side of the basin: more expensive flats. People would be marginalised, people would be removed, those who couldn’t afford to stay. It didn’t seem fair. It didn’t seem right. All of a sudden it hit me: it felt odd, slightly disingenuous even, that she would join me for some lunch, something that she had vehemently resisted doing with me so many times before.

The café was empty. We walked inside and took a seat at a small table for two by the window. A bored-looking waitress looked up from her fingernails and walked over to our table. She stood over us, waiting for us to speak. The taint of fried egg and chip fat followed her. I liked her, there was no fuss about her persona; she was plain and simple. She existed and that was enough, there was no need for anything else because everything else was superfluous to her. I raised my eyes. I could see straight up her nostrils.

“I’ll have a black coffee and …”

I turned to my companion. She was looking at the menu, furrowing her eyebrows into a tight V. Then she looked up, smiling.

“I’ll have a hot chocolate and a baked potato with chili, please … May I have lots of butter on the potato?”

The waitress shrugged, as if to imply that ordinarily she wouldn’t give out extra butter to customers. Then she turned to me, but I’d been observing them and wasn’t prepared.

“Are you not eating? I thought you were hungry.”

“I don’t know what to have …”

“Have the same as me …”

“Okay, I’ll have the same again, please …”

“Extra butter for you, too?”

“Er … Yes, please.”

The bored waitress walked away to the kitchen. As I was about to open my mouth to speak, two more people walked into the café. A man and a woman. I didn’t recognise them at first, probably because it was the first time I had seen them up close. But after a moment it hit me—it was them, the couple from the whitewashed office block. The same man and woman who had been smoking out on the company esplanade. The man in the tight shirts and cardigans, the woman who sits at the desk that he walks back and forth to throughout the working day. It was definitely them. They eventually took a table opposite us after looking up at the menu boards above the counter. They sat down after he carefully removed her coat for her, smiling, giddy, happy, sitting close together, huddled.

She wouldn’t look at them. She stared down to her feet. I knew that she knew who they were. She had seen them enter the café and eventually recognised them as I had. A deathly silence descended upon our table. I didn’t know what to do to defeat it. I felt completely powerless. She was hunched over, staring down at our table, at her feet. Something to concentrate on, something to divert her eyes and mind away from the couple from the whitewashed office block sitting directly opposite us, close enough to hear, to smell. I tried to listen to what they were saying but they were purposely talking in whispers, sensing the quiet, aware that they could be heard, lending the situation the feeling that it was some sort of clandestine tryst.

Suddenly the man leant over their table and kissed her. It was a lingering, open-mouthed kiss on her lips, intimate and
sensuous. There was no movement in front of me, although I could detect a fierce rage building inside her. She definitely didn’t want the man and woman there, at the table opposite us, and she obviously didn’t want there to be any physical contact between them. She knew who they were, or at least him. It was her sole reason for sitting on the bench each day. Her sole reason: him.

I tried to gain her attention by pointing to a cat out through the window. It was crossing the road from the opposite side where the Duke of Cambridge pub was.

“Look! A cat using a zebra crossing! How clever!”

“…”

She shrugged. She did it without looking at me. Then she yawned. I began to speak some more; I couldn’t handle the situation, the silence. This wasn’t how I had envisaged it to be.

“What do you think they’re building?”

She looked up immediately. I asked this already knowing the answer, but it was all I could think of to ask her.

“
Who? Them
?”

She raised her eyes towards the table opposite.

“No. No. No. Not them … No … The space. Where our bench used to be. What do you think they’re going to be building? The health centre will be knocked down and everything …”

“
Building
?”

“Yes. Where our bench used to be …”

“Flats.”

“Do you reckon?”

“I don’t care, to be honest.”

“Oh. Why?”

“It’s a pointless and boring question.”

“Oh.”

“
I really don’t care
.”

She continued to look downwards, towards her feet, the floor, a speck of dust. She looked uncomfortable, as if she didn’t want to be recognised. The man and woman were laughing, sharing a secret joke or something. They were sitting closer to each other, and he was stroking her cheek with the back of one hand. She was blinking, blushing a little, not coquettishly, but knowingly, as if they had planned something devious together. The woman was wearing a tight black skirt and black, thin tights that were thin enough to give a hint, a sniff of pale flesh underneath. She was almost bursting out from her expensive-looking white blouse. She was clicking the heel of her right stiletto on the tiled floor—like an old clock ticking down the hours. In the silence that had now descended upon the whole café, her clicking heel was all that could be heard.

Click.

Click.

Click.

Click.

I noticed that my own right leg had begun to shake furiously—as if in synchronicity with the sound of her heel. I tried to stop it but I couldn’t. Then our food came, the bored waitress almost dropping each plate onto the table. I stared at my plate of food. I couldn’t eat it. I looked up and she was tucking in, eating it like it was her last ever meal.

“You’re hungry.”

“Yes.”

“Are you in a rush?”

“Yes.”

I took my knife and fork and dug into the hot steaming potato covered in the thick, indistinguishable chili. I swallowed it quickly. It was way too hot for the roof of my mouth. On any other day this would have been a great little meal and
I’d have probably wolfed the whole lot down, but the sudden appearance of the man and woman from the whitewashed office block had put an abrupt halt to any such thing.

His hair was perfectly groomed in that ruffled, just-got-out-of-bed look that seemed popular with males of no imagination who still followed the fashions. His shoes looked expensive. There wasn’t a blemish on his face. It was a happy, good-looking face, contained and unaware. She had recently dyed her hair it seemed; it looked healthy and in vogue. By her clicking heel was her expensive-looking bag—large, garish, open and stuffed with three thick, glossy fashion magazines. She looked happy, too.

“Why aren’t you eating your food?”

Her plate was empty and she was looking directly at me, holding her mug of hot chocolate in her cupped hands.

“I don’t know … It’s just that …”

“That what?”

“Well, that as soon as those two people walked in … that man and woman … something changed.”

“
Something
?”

“
You
. You changed, you turned inwards …”

“Why would those two people affect me?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

“There’s nothing to tell …”

“
Yes, there is
. But you explain things only when you want to, it always seems …”

“…”

I was beginning to feel quite angry. I wanted to shout something out. I wanted to shake her.

She began to yawn, quite openly, looking back down towards her feet, avoiding the man and the woman on the table opposite.

I have often thought that cafés are strange places—especially if you frequent them alone. A kind of nothingness can be created, seated as you invariably are at your preferred table by the window, watching the world pass you by outside, or the rain trickle down the pane. It is as if you are floating, completely suspended in nothingness.

They began to kiss again. This time for longer and with added passion. Both continued in a world of their own making. A world there, opposite us, close enough to touch, or disrupt. The kiss lasted for minutes; it was quite uncomfortable to watch, but it was impossible to ignore. It felt awkward, like we had all walked in on a private moment.

Click.

Click.

Click.

Click.

It was at that moment that she began to sob in front of me. Silently. Her shoulders shaking. The tears streaming down her cheeks, hardly showing any emotion. I tried to reach out to her, to touch her hand, but she recoiled, as if my mere touch would harm her.

She allowed the tears to fall, smearing her mascara, trickling down each pale cheek. I wanted to wipe them away, but I knew there was nothing I could have done to help her.

Everything was beginning to make me angry. It should have been me on the table opposite, not with the woman he was with, but with her. I should have been there, doing those things, the same things as he was with her.

Her tears wouldn’t cease, and her silence somehow made them seem all the more significant—like she was crying for everyone.

I have never been able to handle the tears of other people. I have walked out of rooms when I shouldn’t have done as close friends of mine have allowed the tears to fall from their eyes in front of me. I have asked family members to stop crying at funerals. It’s not that I am against emotion or the outpouring of sadness. It’s the physical secretion, the physical act, the physical act of expelling something from deep inside. It’s like the force of gravity has pulled each tear from within the body, back out, down towards the earth where it belongs. It’s the constant reminder of the weight that envelops us all—the return to nothingness. To dirt.