The Canal

by Lee Rourke

  My right leg began to shake; I didn’t know what to say. I looked at her. She looked at me. I noticed that she had large dark eyes, a little droopy, cat-like, made up that way, the corners turned up with a flick of eye-liner—I was instantly attracted to them. To her. But this was nothing new, as I was often attracted to complete and utter strangers.

  “Well?”

  Her persistence unnerved me. I stammered. My right leg shook even more than usual.

  “I … er … I’m bored.”

  That was all I managed to say to her because as soon as I said it she got up and walked away, back towards Hackney, with the rest of the commuters. My leg stopped its involuntary paroxysms. I stared at the office workers across the canal: one by one they switched off their flat-screen monitors. Some left the building alone, others in twos and threes—to begin the journey home, I guessed, or maybe to the nearest public house, it being a Friday. I got up and headed home towards Hackney as well.

  - five -

  A lot of people have attributed boredom to a lack of things to do—this has always confused me. For me the act of boredom, by its very nature, is doing something. As I have mentioned before, boredom moves me, it forces me to react. Boredom is often viewed as a defect of character, but this is wholly unfair. People who are bored are usually perceived by others as not willing to interact with those around them, or with society as a whole. This couldn’t be further from the truth: those who are bored, and, more importantly, embrace their boredom, have a far clearer perspective on a) themselves, and b) those around them. Those who are not bored are merely lost in superfluous activity: fashion, lifestyle, TV, drink, drugs, technology, et cetera—the usual things we use to pass the time. The irony being that they are just as bored as I am, only they think they’re not because they are continually doing something. And what they are doing is battling boredom, which is a losing battle.

  I spent the whole weekend with them, drinking in the same pub, with the same people, the same faces; drinking the same drinks, saying the same things. After I had exhausted myself saying the same things I simply said nothing. I let those around me say the very same things for me. I drank. I can’t even remember stopping to eat, although I figure I must have done at some point. All I really wanted was to be back at the canal. My weekend was a waste. I wanted to be back on that bench, waiting for her.

  - six -

  It was Monday morning. The same commuters, the same bench. I didn’t care about the time; it was starting to pass me by anyway. I was sitting, picking at a spot that had formed on the bridge of my nose. Picking at the skin, the slight swelling around it. Pushing it in; tracing the bump that had formed with the tip of my finger. Stubble had begun to grow on my face, spreading like a virus. I had stopped shaving, but not consciously—I’d forgotten that that’s what I liked to do, that’s all. I continued to pick at my spot on the bridge of my nose. It took me a while to work out what had caused it: a wine glass. Well, many wine glasses over the course of the weekend, aggravating the skin as the rim caught it each time I tilted my head back to finish another glass. After I had worked that out it didn’t irritate me quite as much.

  I found my thoughts drifting of their own accord towards her; I wanted her to turn up. I hoped that my crumbling riposte the previous week hadn’t alarmed her.

  I fell for a girl in my class at school. She was called Caitlin Booth. Her parents were from Dublin and she had lived there up until the age of ten. Her accent was beautiful and mellifluous. I used to sit behind her. I would ignore the teacher (to such an extent that I can no longer remember which lesson it was we were attending). I would look at her golden hair, nestling on her shoulders—occasionally she would flick it, or tilt her head to the right, letting it fall over her blue eyes. The skin on the back of her neck was pale, freckled, and her clothes smelled faintly of the chips she had eaten at lunchtime. To me she was beautiful. One day I was instructed to sit next to her when the teacher grouped us all into pairs to work together on some exercise or other. I could hardly breathe, I was that nervous. My leg was probably shaking more that it ever has—either that or it was then that it first began to happen. I watched her take her pencil case and books from her bag. I looked at her books: on the back of one she had scrawled, Caitlin Booth loves Anthony Lomax 68% and, Caitlin Booth loves Aaron Maguire 54% and, Caitlin Booth loves Sean Owen 91%. I could have died on the spot. She noticed me looking at her books; she smiled and asked me what I was looking at. So I told her. She told me that she didn’t really love them, that it was just a bit of fun. Then she said she’d do it for me. She wrote down her name and then mine. Then she began a multiplication and subtraction routine based, it seemed, on the letters in our names and their place in the alphabet. I stared. But I soon noticed that instead of writing the word loves in between our names—like she had done with the other names scrawled on her book—she had replaced it with the word loathes. I had never heard this word before—let alone seen it written down. I remember asking her what it meant: she told me that it was just another word for love. It felt like my whole body was shaking. Soon the multiplication and subtraction was complete and she showed me the result: she loathed me 98%. I realise now that I have no idea or recollection as to what her true percentage was. I just remember being elated. That night, happy and madly in love, I looked up the word loathes in the pocket Oxford dictionary that I used to keep by my bed. I never looked at Caitlin Booth again.

  I tried not to look bothered when she finally arrived: green. She was dressed in green. As usual she slowly sat herself down to my right. This time she turned directly towards me:

  “So, you’re here again?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bored?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m worried …”

  “Why?”

  “The dredgers haven’t arrived …”

  “I’ve been thinking about that, too.”

  “Are you just saying that?”

  “No, really, I’ve been waiting for the dredgers, too.”

  She released a long, drawn-out yawn. It seemed to last aeons; the whole shape of her face changed. It reminded me of an Aphex Twin video I had once seen that I cannot recall the name of—not particularly being a fan of Aphex Twin’s music. After she has finished yawning she turned to me again:

  “I once lied to my boyfriend …”

  “What about?”

  “I told him that I was pregnant. I told him that it was his baby …”

  “Wasn’t it his baby?”

  “It was no one’s baby …”

  “Eh?”

  “It was no one’s baby …”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There was no baby … That was the lie.”

  “What?”

  “I wasn’t pregnant … I told him that I didn’t want it.”

  “The imaginary baby?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.”

  “I told him that I wanted an abortion … Immediately … And, because he was the father, he should pay for it. That it, the baby, was as much his responsibility as mine …”

  “Did he pay?”

  “Yes. The whole amount. The last thing he wanted to be was a father.”

  “What did you do with the money?”

  “I spent it on a weekend in the Lake District with my best friend. We got drunk, fucked men, had fun …”

  “Why?”

  “Why have fun?”

  “No … Why lie to your boyfriend like that?”

  “Because he deserved it. He was cheating on me. He didn’t care about me. He hated me. Oh, the usual stuff, you know. The only thing he cared about was money, so I hit him where it hurt. In his pocket. Money was everything to him, still is probably, I don’t know really. It was all he lived for. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. It’s all everyone lives for, it seems.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  “I am right. I turned his guilt, his hatred for me into a commodity. And he—the moron—
bought into it. He bought his own piece of me. And at the same time hated the fact that he had to give me, of all people, money. These are the depths people will sink to.”

  She began to pick at the skin near her fingernails. The skin looked smooth and shiny. She was fresh-looking and clean. She stared straight ahead, towards the office workers in the whitewashed building opposite. I watched her chest rise and fall. I didn’t know what to say to her. A discarded can of beer floating by caught my attention. A lone swan avoided it, paying it no attention whatsoever.

  We sat on the bench in silence for maybe an hour before I asked her.

  “What’s your name?”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I prefer to remain anonymous.”

  “Why?”

  “Things are easier like that … You’ll see the end of me anyway”

  “I think I know what you mean.”

  With this she got up to her feet and walked off towards Hackney. I watched her. I liked her gait. She walked with purpose, yet slowly, like she was floating, her head in the clouds, yet towards something, a confrontation, maybe. I stood up.

  “Wait! Wait! Wait! Wait! Wait! Wait! Wait!”

  Eventually she stopped, but she didn’t turn around. I ran towards her; just as I got to her she turned to face me.

  “What?”

  “Er …”

  “What?”

  “Well … Will you be here tomorrow?”

  “Yes … I always come by this way.”

  She continued on. I turned around and walked back to the bench. “You’ll see the end of me anyway …” It stuck in my mind, even though I had no idea what she was talking about. I tried not to think about it too much. But it was hard not to.

  I looked over at the office workers opposite, sitting at their snazzy monitors. It was like I’d never even had a job. I couldn’t continue with that sort of thing anymore. Work was nothing to me now. I was happy—happy that I wasn’t them, stuck in that dreadful place of work. I decided that I would go home and compose a letter of resignation. And I would write this letter in my own hand. An email wouldn’t suffice; I wanted my letter to be authentic.

  - seven -

  Dear Richard,

  I can’t go on anymore with this. I can’t see the point. I don’t expect you to understand my feelings about this. I am bored with work full stop. Not your company, but work. You may think that I am ergophobic, that I need help, that there is an obvious solution to this—there isn’t, Richard, not in the way you’re thinking. I am simply bored. I am not sick. I have no psychological disorder. I simply want to embrace my boredom—and my boredom forces me to walk away from work.

  Some people work because they are bored—they aren’t aware of this fact though. Some people spend their entire working lives bored and never once question this. They accept this by trying to quell it; maybe they would be a lot happier if they tried embracing it rather than trying to ignore it—or battling against it—all their miserable/happy lives. I am embracing boredom—yes—that’s what I am doing. I don’t need to clear my desk; those things are superfluous to me now. Richard, I wish you every success in your venture. No hard feelings, eh? Goodbye, talking about boredom bores me. I must act.

  Yours,

  A happy man.

  - eight -

  I was waiting for her when I was suddenly surrounded by a group of teenagers. They just seemed to appear out from the foliage or something. Two plonked themselves down either side of me on the bench. The other two loitered threateningly in front of me, music blaring from a snazzy mobile phone, blocking my view of the canal and the whitewashed office block. The music they were listening to was Dizzee Rascal—although it could have been any one of the numerous grime stars of London. Dizzee Rascal is the only one I have heard of, so I presumed it was him. Then they began to swap places. I found this very unnerving. A couple of them began shouting along with the tinny music blaring from the snazzy mobile phone. I started to feel uncomfortable, even though they were clearly much younger than me. Two of them had put their hoods up (something I usually liked; aesthetically, if done correctly, a group of teenagers dressed this way can look striking). They began to lean over me.

  “What you doing, man?”

  “What you up to, man?”

  “What you doing?”

  “What you doing here?”

  This seemed to be ejaculated at once; a cacophony of teenagers and testosterone—a heady combination.

  “What you doing on this bench for, man?”

  “What you doing on this bench?”

  “What you doing just sitting here?”

  “What you doing, man?”

  My right leg began to shake. I wanted to shout, to start running, but I couldn’t muster the energy.

  “Are you a battyboy, man?”

  “Are you a battyboy, innit?”

  “Are you a battyboy?”

  “Battyboy, man?”

  I looked across to the office workers through a gap between two of the teenagers. There must have been a meeting in progress at one of the desks, as all the staff had wheeled their chairs over to it. I counted ten in total, but it was hard to determine for certain as the two teenagers in front of me kept obstructing my view. I could see a woman addressing the team. All, except one who was looking directly over to me. He was young. I’m sure he was smiling.

  “What you doing, man?”

  “Do you suck wood, man?”

  “Are you battyboy, innit?”

  “Do you have any money, innit?”

  It was rapidly turning into my worst nightmare. I had no money on my person. If I told them I had no money they would turn violent, that’s how these situations unfold.

  “Have you got any money, man?”

  “Have you got any money?”

  “You got money, man?”

  “Have you got any, man?”

  The smallest of the four—who had bright red hair—began to fumble for something inside his pockets. He yawned. He pulled out his cigarettes. I let out a sigh—I thought he was searching for a knife. I thought he was going to threaten me with it; it’s always the smaller ones with something to prove. He lit his cigarette with a match and flicked the still-lit match at a lone coot on the canal, missing it by half a foot or so. I could smell the sulphur. He turned and exhaled the blue smoke into my face. He muttered something to the other three in slang that I couldn’t understand. They laughed.

  “What you here for then?”

  “Yeah, what you doing here?”

  “Looking for business?”

  “Looking for some wood to suck?”

  I looked up at the tallest of the four; he had a shaved head. He reminded me of an old school friend whom I hadn’t thought about in over twenty years: Sean Murray, who used to spend all day and night on his computer, learning binary code and basic programming. It made no sense to me then as much as now: numbers and instruction. It’s meaningless to me. Sean Murray wouldn’t have hurt a fly. He still wouldn’t. The teenager with the shaved head leaned closer to me.

  “Why you here, we just asked you?”

  “Why you here, man?”

  “Man, why you here, innit?”

  “Yeah man, why you on this bench?”

  I jolted upright, my muscles tensing, fear gripping me.

  “Because, I’m bored …”

  The nanosecond of silence seemed to last aeons before the four teenagers collapsed into laughter.

  “Let’s leave this battyboy, man.”

  “Yeah, we can go up Mare Street.”

  “But he might have money, man.”

  “He ain’t got no bean, man.”

  I watched them as they walked away, laughing, patting each other on the back, swaggering. They began to pick up stones and throw them into the canal. The red-haired teenager looked back at me and made some sort of hand/finger gesture, the kind I’ve seen used in gangster rap videos—it looked stupid used in this contex
t, near the coots and Canada geese on the canal. I began to wonder if the teenagers were part of the Pack Crew I’d seen spray-painted around the area. Whoever they were, they were certainly intimidating. I watched them as far as I could (which wasn’t that far as the overgrown privets impeded my view), although I didn’t try too hard, as I didn’t want to look like I was staring at them. They may have seen this as a signal, they may have come back, and I didn’t want that to happen.

  My right leg soon stopped shaking. I looked at the reflection of the whitewashed office block in the murky water, just a faint trace of it; the sun above had broken free from a heavy-looking cloud. The faint reflection shimmered and morphed into different shapes with the changing patterns of the murky water. I looked back up. The meeting was still in progress and the office worker who was once looking directly at me was now looking at some figures projected onto the far white wall of their section of the office via an overhead projector. The woman who seemed to be conducting the meeting was struggling to use her laptop. The office workers present seemed to be staring up at the projected image regardless of her inability. Pretty soon the projected image on the white wall changed: it became a red and blue graph, the sort used for such a benign purpose. The woman must have cracked a joke about her inability to use the technology provided—this must’ve been the case because I’ve never seen one person laugh at a graph for no reason, let alone about ten people.

  It was later than usual when she eventually arrived. I’d lost count of how long I’d been waiting—it must have been a long time, though, because the office workers, as they did each evening, had started to switch off their flat-screen monitors, and the pedestrians and cyclists on the towpath were now moving in the opposite direction as they were that morning.

  She was wearing black and white. I had started to notice more about her. She always seemed so clean; flat shoes, tight trousers falling above her ankles. Her skin smooth and tender. She was unlike most people from that area; even the art students and young professionals didn’t look quite like her. She was, or seemed, different. She sat closer to me than usual. She was smoking a cigarette—I hadn’t noticed this about her before. I’m not the biggest fan of people who smoke. She started to speak to me immediately.