Here's a small bit of fanciful writing.
In Chapter Two of his wonderful The Black Book, Orhan, in his guise as the columnist Celal Salik, describes a moment when the Bosphorus dries up, exposing its many secrets to the columnist (anti-) hero, who goes looking for a legendary Cadillac, containing the corpse of a Beyoglu hood and his moll. In a strange way, it expressed a similar desire of mine, but on a considerably smaller scale: What would happen if the Thames, as it passed through Reading, dried up entirely?
It was a notion I entertained on those lazy days I spent fishing on its banks in the late seventies and early eighties, usually during the summer holidays, with a background of tennis from Wimbledon, or the World Cup or Olympics or some such sporting endeavour, and the music provided first by Donna Summer and disco, then the Pistols and the punks, then Ska, Two Tone, Reggae and New Romantics: What would it be like, to see this river reduced to nothing more than a trough in the ground separating Reading from Caversham?
I imagined day after hot day, spent lazing on the banks, noticing how the torrent over the weir slowed to a trickle and its rich green odour was replaced by something ranker and more defiled; How the water table sank centimetre by centimetre, leaving banks of newly exposed mud, first gleaming, then crackling into hexagonal shapes; The river weed withering, then being replaced by willows, buddleias, plantains, reeds, sycamores, brambles, grasses, and dandelions, and the ducks, geese, swans, coots, moorhens and grebes being supplanted by sparrows, thrushes, robins, blackbirds, crows and whatnot; And when there was no more than the odd steaming puddle to remind the citizens of Reading, who crowded and hurtled across the bridges on their ways to and from work, of what had once been, I and my playmates would scour the drying riverbed for signs of our history.
Amid the numerous corpses of shopping trolleys, we would discover the coins we�d given to the river in supplication at the beginning of each fishing season in the hope of catching plenty. Where once they floated on the tranquil surface, the narrowboat owners would have set up their crafts on the steep banks, propping them up on old bits of scaffolding appropriated from the river bed , and constructing verandahs from pieces of flotsam. Creeping through the scaffolding poles, we�d discover, along with the inevitable cans and bottles hurled by generation of drunk after drunk, buttons, caps, wallets fat with filthy rotting notes, odd trainers, strange trousers, things flung away in fury or shame, plastic things, metal things, worthless things, things. And we would collect these exhibits of our society in the thousands of old, mud silted plastic bags we would find lining the surface of this new valley.
But once my friends had gone home, I would stay on in this new playground, and start digging for that history beyond my own present: For example, I would walk carefully through the swampy ground until I got to Caversham Bridge, now arching high overhead, and with a handy willow stick I would scratch the moist earth for evidence of the Chapel of Our Lady of Caversham, destroyed in the Reformation, to which, according to contemporary sources, �An Oone Winged Angell did bringe the hede of the speare that did perce oor saviours side�: Perhaps I would even find It myself, the Spear of Destiny, here in a (as I discovered later) not particularly remarkable town near London. Then again, I could walk back to the weir, and try to find evidence of the great battle between the Vikings and the Saxons in 760 a.d. � perhaps a broadsword, maybe even a longship, sunk with a perfect cargo of rowers, their skeletons waiting patiently for an order to pull on their oars that would never come. I would come across the tiny skeletons of the victims of Mary Jones, who, in the nineteenth century, was convicted of the murder of seven infants in her charge, but was suspected of the deaths of many, many more. Perhaps I would come across the relics of some saint, once venerated at Reading Abbey, but dispersed by Henry VIII�s wrath. Then again, there would perhaps be the black and putrid ribs of one of his sailing barges, having sunk with its cargo of beechwood for the ceiling at Hampton Court. Stepping through the rusted metal maze of shopping trolleys, bicycles, stolen motor bikes and car parts, I might come across cannon shot and musket balls from the Civil War. In this slimy green valley, where once swans dappled the surface and fish patrolled the depths, and where now kids performed tricks on their mountain bikes or smoked spliffs in the shadow of the old weir, and the beggars and addicts who haunted the town during the day came to their makeshift beds at night, and which the local paper bemoaned and implored the local council to do something about, I would compile a list of all those discarded objects that filled it, a list that would tell someone who we were. And from that list, I could compile story after story, each one related to Reading and its secrets. My book would have a double, a triple, a multiple meaning, each one more mysterious than the other, depending on the reader�s ability to pierce words and phrases for further meaning. The book of Reading, that is, the book of the settlement of the people of the mysterious leader known only as Reada, or �Red�, would also be the book of reading, an instruction into the mysteries of books and words themselves, and the reader, or Reader, would become sucked into this strange construction itself. Reading, reading; a place, no more unusual than anywhere else, it would be transformed into Minos� labyrinth, Dante�s journey, Gulliver�s travels, Ibn Batutta�s great lifelong quest, simply by the act of recording it all; And when I finished the book, I would set it in a witch-jar, seal the top, and bury it in the bed of the Thames just as winter�s rains finally began, and the river flowed over the trees and the beggars and the poles holding up the narrow boats and swallow the mystery once more for another generation to discover.
And then, of course, I would wake out of my reverie (How could I not? All stories are dreams, after all) to find my fishing line snagged on something in the flowing, rich-scented river; some weed perhaps, or an old bottle - something I couldn�t see, anyway.
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