A Spot Of Bother

40

The atmosphere in the town center was becoming noticeably more rowdy as young people began gathering for a night of heavy drinking. So George made his way down Bridge Street to the river for some peace and quiet and an explanation for the hovering helicopter.

When he reached the quayside he realized that whatever was happening was both more serious and more interesting than he had imagined. An ambulance was parked on the road and a police car was pulled up behind, its blue light revolving in the cold air.

Ordinarily he would have walked away, not wanting to be thought ghoulish. But nothing was ordinary today.

The helicopter was so low that he could feel the noise as a vibration in his head and shoulders. He stood by the little chain-link fence next to the Chinese restaurant, warming his hands in his trouser pockets. A searchlight from the base of the helicopter was moving in zigzags over the surface of the water.

Someone had fallen into the river.

A gust of wind blew a brief crackle of walkie-talkie noise toward him then whisked it away again.

In its own macabre way it was rather wonderful. Like a film. The way life rarely was. The little yellow oblong of the ambulance window, the sliding clouds, the water choppy under the downdraft from the helicopter, everything brighter and more intense than usual.

Farther down the river two paramedics in fluorescent yellow jackets were walking methodically down the towpath, shining torches into the water and poking submerged objects with a long pole. Looking for a body, presumably.

A siren whooped and was immediately turned off. A car door slammed.

He glanced down at the water in front of him.

He had never really looked at the river this closely before. Not at night. Not when the level was up. He had always assumed that he would have no problems if he fell into any water. He was a decent swimmer. Forty lengths every morning whenever they stayed in a hotel with a pool. And when John Zinewski’s Fireball capsized he had been scared, briefly, but it had never occurred to him that he might drown.

This was different. It did not even look like water. It was moving too swiftly, coiling and eddying and rolling over on itself like a large animal. Upstream of the bridge it was heaped in front of the stanchions like lava negotiating a rock. Below the stanchions it vanished into a black sinkhole.

He could suddenly see how heavy water really was when it was moving en masse, like tar or treacle. It would drag you down or grind you against a concrete wall and there would be nothing you could do about it, however good a swimmer you were.

Someone had fallen in the river. He realized suddenly what this meant.

He imagined the first shock of the violent cold, then the desperate scrabble for a handhold on the bank, the stones greasy with moss, fingernails breaking, clothes becoming rapidly waterlogged.

But maybe this was what they had wanted. Maybe they had thrown themselves in. Maybe they had made no attempt to climb out, and the only struggle was the struggle to let go, to silence that hunger for light and life.

He pictured them trying to swim down into the dark. He recalled the passage on drowning in How We Die. He saw them trying to breathe water, their windpipe closing in spasm to protect the soft tissue of the lungs. With their windpipe closed they would have been unable to breathe. And the longer they spent not breathing the weaker they would become. They would start to swallow water and air. The water and the air would be churned into a foam and the whole grisly process would take on an unstoppable momentum. The foam would make them gag (these details had stuck really quite vividly in his memory). They would vomit. The vomit would fill their mouth and in that terminal gasp when the lack of oxygen in their bloodstream finally relaxed the spasm in their windpipe, they would have no option but to swallow it down, water, air, foam, vomit, the lot.

He had been at the riverside for five minutes. He had seen the helicopter ten minutes ago. God knows how long it had taken for the alarm to be raised, or the helicopter to arrive. Whoever it was they were almost certainly dead by now.

He felt some of the same horror he had felt on the train, but it did not overwhelm him this time. Indeed, it was balanced by a kind of solace. He could imagine doing this. The drama of it. The way you could imagine dying peacefully if only the right piece of music was playing. Like that Barber Adagio they always seemed to be playing on Classic FM when he was in the car.

It seemed so violent, suicide. But here, now, up close, it seemed different, more a case of doing violence to the body that kept you shackled to an unlivable life. Cutting it loose and being free.

He looked down again. Six inches beyond his toes the water heaved and slithered, now blue, now black in the revolving light from the police car.