Crystal Clear

Crystal Clear (29th May 2008, 11.57pm)

Crystal clear, the water isn’t. I imagine what she would have been thinking, standing here on the edge of the lock,

staring down into the green-tinged murk that passes for water in the River Avon.

The funniest things float down the river. It’s amusing to sit and watch, on days when the rain has stopped and the pace of the water quickens and the floods bring gifts to those that are willingly waiting.

You can haul out anything, if you can reach it. The current pushes outwards from the centre, washing things against the banks, into the reeds and in between the boats and the floating pontoons. Beginning with the mundane, obligatory things; logs, sticks, weeds, leaves, blossom. Foam and suds from showers and washing-ups upstream. The occasional plastic bag or piece of polystyrene in summer that multiply in winter floods to the extreme. Rubbish. Sanitary products that have escaped from bags. People fly-tip, it’s disgusting. Fishing them out of the trees once the river goes down, balanced precariously on one leg, leaning out across the gap between the bank and the pontoon, wielding a pole with a hook on it. The cleaning process.

I’ve got seven footballs now, in various stages of deflation. I lose them as often as I find them; my terrier tends to play with them enthusiastically, and over the side of the deck they go, back from whence they came.

Firewood. Once it’s dried out. A half-full container of spray-able liquid fence sealant, a creosote substitute. A deck chair from the park in Bath, possibly chucked in by a drunken rugby fan, post weekend match.

And my neighbour, once, standing at her kitchen window, waving at the passing holiday traffic, unaware that their cheerful grins as they waved back were in amusement at her new roof decoration, courtesy of her fore-neighbour: a vibrator, perched on the boat roof. I wonder whose it was and how it came to be in the river. That would make an interesting tale.

Thinking of all the crap that ends up in the river, I shudder to think of what she might have swallowed with the water. Flat coke to settle the stomach, a friend’s mother once told me. I hate coke.

In the summer, this is a favourite loitering spot for the local teens, drinking cheap bottled cider and trying to ignite the huge old timbers of the lock gates with petrol and nicked lighters. The pool of tar beneath the gate glistens blackly in the weak afternoon sun.

It’ll rain again in a minute. It was raining last week when they hauled her out, swollen and dripping, white and slightly translucent in the storm-light. That yellowish tinge; I couldn’t tell if it was the light or her skin or the green of the river water, or a combination of these things.

What disturbed me was the peaceful look on her face as they laid her out. She’d lost that lost look.

I shudder as I cast the daffodils in. Yellow to cheer her up. She left that cardigan at mine the day before, as if casting off her last layer of happiness.

I suppose it was my fault. If I hadn’t bought the boat, she’d never have come here. I wonder how she’d have done it. I think I’d choose some other method. I wouldn’t want to die with a plastic bag wrapped round my foot and a piece of tree hanging from my mouth.

I watch a cruiser boat come through the lock. It’s a deep lock, and a long process. A long way down when she’s in the bottom, the water bubbling up, the gates creaking shut. When it flooded last winter, you couldn’t see the lock; the water was right up over the gates, and the fields surrounding became lakes.

The boat owners seem confused by the daffodils. When the lock is filled, they’ll open the lower gates and the flowers will float out, downriver, following the current. I’ll wait here until I can’t see them anymore, and then I’ll go home.

I draw her yellow cardigan tightly across my chest, and wrap my arms down over it, self-hugging, my eyes filled with crystal clear water that is nothing like the river, just caused by it.