eighteen
I could feel her body weight, combined with the swan’s, pulling back from me, back into the rain and the canal. So I pulled her, yanking her towards me, towards the bank, finally pulling her and the dead swan out of the murky water. She emerged and clambered up, steadying herself as she stepped up onto the bank, onto the cold, wet stone slabs of the bank, holding on to the dead swan. I let go of her, as if we’d completed a natural balletic pas de deux, that she’d landed, as if she was up on the bank completely, but she wasn’t, and as she tried to step towards me she slipped. Her feet went from beneath her like she was on ice and she fell sideways. I watched her fall all the way to one of the large stone slabs that constituted the whole of the bank’s edge, a stone that had been there in its place for over one hundred years. I watched her fall, sideways, to my left, still holding onto the dead swan like its life depended on it. I watched as her poor head hit the cold stone slab of the bank with terrific force, cracking as she violently connected with it. The sound of it, of her head, hit me in the pit of my stomach. The dead swan landed upon her, its long neck stretched out along her torso and down to her thighs, its breast resting upon hers, wings limp and half outstretched, the stubby arrow visible through its neck. The blood pouring from its wound had already started to turn a deep crimson as it began to oxygenate with the atmosphere around it. She lay like this, the dead swan positioned suggestively upon her, motionless. I was half expecting her to scramble back to her feet, to jump up, but she didn’t. I watched the dark, oozing pool of thick blood — her blood — slowly form beneath her head, covering the slab as it began to trickle back, behind her, down into the murky water. Suddenly the dead swan’s neck jerked, momentarily caught in some nerve-spasm, and then stiffen, before falling impotent and limp again, the stubby arrowhead poking through the other side catching on the stone slab beside her. She was dead, too.
She was dead. Her face slowly lost its colour and all signs of the life that once possessed it. Her eyes were slightly open; she looked dazed, ravaged even, staring into nothingness, unfixed and bleeding, blood shot and blank, her pupils a dark blemish, blotting out any colour that could be possibly left in her iris. Her mouth, her lips were hanging slightly ajar, as if she’d been about to open them to say something before her fatal slip. Her whole head hung to one side rather coquettishly, or as if she was embarrassed — if one can look that way in death.
In death: she was dead before me, with her swan, its long neck. Her left arm was still holding onto it, underneath its open wings, clutching at its breast, her slender fingers grasping between its feathers, smudged by its blood. It was the way that the swan had positioned itself upon her that left its mark: as if possessed by something, as if the image before me there on the cold slab of stone by the canal was meant to have been captured and scrutinised — by me, looking down upon them, in death, their death combined in the perfect image. The delicate fingers of her free hand, poised, as if conducting the final, delicate notes of a lost orchestra … the music fading, ending, the sonorous spectacle fading into elegant silence. Her torso looked crumpled, resting on its side, the weight dissipating, her t-shirt, clothes, clinging to her slight form, her midriff exposed to the wet, cold elements, her dead skin pale and translucent.
I often think back to this moment, trying to capture what it was — it seemed like I was standing there, looking, simply looking, for far too much time. It was as if I played no part in it, as if it had been meticulously acted out in front of me, there beneath the rusting iron bridge, by the canal and the whitewashed office block on the border of Hackney and Islington, where each borough begins.
nineteen
I stood and stared at her blood, at her cracked head. Then I suddenly came to my senses and rushed over to her. She was lying on the cold slab of stone at the water’s edge as if she was about to fall off it and back into the murky canal, the dead swan upon her breast. It seemed to be caressing her openly, the feathers fluttering in the strong breeze channelling beneath the bridge. I was frantically shouting for help, I must have been, I don’t really know, it all seemed to be unreal. It is the image of her blood repeating within me: trickling onto the cold slab, sending me into uncontrollable fits and spasms, coupled with an overwhelming fear that had began to consume me. I began to shout her name. Over and over again, I don’t know, at least that explains the noise that had enveloped me and the whole sorry scene below the bridge. The blood from the swan’s neck had started to pour onto her thighs, soaking the flimsy, yet obviously expensive fabric of her trousers, mixing in with the rain, the murky water and the silt and mud, the gritty detritus of the canal smeared between each fibre. Her skin was still losing colour at a remarkable rate; she looked pallid, almost as if she was formed from a fusion of wax and transparent plastic. Her expressionless face looked set like the image in a poorly taken photograph — blurred around the edges, a little out of focus and over-exposed.
Her eyes were completely dead: two giant empty pools of nothingness, drained of all life and hope, of any sense that they may have opened at any given moment, and everything I had witnessed was some cruel, sick hoax played by my decaying mind. I could have dealt with it if that’s all it was, if it meant her opening her dead eyes at that moment, to look at me, and then to ask me what had happened to her.
We soon attracted attention — a cyclist. He rushed over, throwing his bike down, and knelt down beside her. He checked her for certain things: breathing, pulse, wounds, et cetera. I asked him to leave her alone, to stop touching her, or the swan, and leave them be, to leave them alone together. He took out his mobile phone and asked me if I had called for help. I shrugged my shoulders helplessly, and he immediately began to shout at me angrily. He looked like he was going to throttle me, but he phoned through to the emergency services instead. He called for an ambulance, talking through her injuries and condition with the operator. Then he phoned through to the RSPB and asked them to come and collect the dead swan. Finally, he called the police. I stood there, motionless, above him, as he crouched down beside her. He kept on asking me, over and over again, what had happened, but I looked at her and the dead swan, repeating the same words.
“It was them. It was them. It was them. It was them. It was them. It was them. It was them. It was them. It was them. It was them. It was them. It was them.”
He began to yell at me again, although this time he was a little calmer in his approach, fatigued by my catatonic state. And then something strange happened: it suddenly stopped raining. As if somebody had switched off a shower in a bathroom, as suddenly as that. The rain simply stopped pouring so abruptly, it seemed almost biblical. I walked up to the opening of the walkway to Shepherdess Walk and leant against the new wall. I could feel the dampness of the rain soaking through the arm of my jacket now. And I knew right there, by Shepherdess Walk, what I had to do. It came to me in a flash.
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.