The Edge

by Jamie Collinson

  Ahead of him, down the steep slope, trees and bushes and grass and reeds sprouted from the river. A mass of green, unmoving in the still air, sun bouncing off the blades and leaves in shades of gold. Abundant life. Beautiful.

  A great blue heron was standing on a rock, very still, one leg raised behind it. It reminded Adam of the man doing t’ai chi in Ernest E. Debs Park, on the day of his first date with Erica. A mother duck, surrounded by ducklings, splashed in the sunny brown water a little further downstream. Something he couldn’t identify flicked out of a tree, then disappeared back into its branches. Adam squinted after it. A green heron perhaps?

  He reached the flat band of concrete at the bottom of the slope, which was half swamped with brownish water in most places. There was an old, disintegrating sneaker sat a little way from the river’s edge. It was another world, down here. Hot and green and jungly and wild. Why had he not thought to walk down the bank before? It was easy enough. Much better to be away from the path, and the men with their logos and attitudes.

  Swifts flitted low between the trees and across the water, ridding the air of some of the many insects, twisting and turning in the brightness. There were strands of rubbish caught in the trees, but not too many. Down here, nature seemed very much in charge.

  Adam pottered along the bank, squinting in the light. He had left his phone at home, and his sunglasses. All he had were his keys, a sandwich wrapped in greaseproof paper – which he had made, for some reason, though he had absolutely no desire to eat – and the dregs of a bottle of water. He should have brought two of those.

  Atwater Village stretched out on the other side of the river, sleepy and smart and well-to-do. Was Erica at home? What was she doing? He saw a vision of himself – as he was now – standing forlornly at the bottom of her driveway. He shuddered at the possibility.

  A little way along, and above him now, was one of the huge outlet pipes that fed excess rainwater from the streets into the river. A slimy brown stain pointed down from it, like a bony finger. Beneath it, a respectable-looking man with grey hair and glasses was standing by the water, arms folded across his t-shirt. Adam stopped a little way from him, and the man turned.

  ‘Hi,’ he said, without smiling, and looked back at the water, frowning.

  ‘Hi,’ Adam said. His voice sounded thick and hoarse. It was the first time he’d spoken all day.

  ‘I don’t suppose,’ the man said, ‘that you’ve seen any frogs while you’ve been walking?’ He looked at Adam again, longer this time, as though trying to figure him out.

  ‘Frogs?’ Adam said. ‘No.’

  ‘Shit,’ the man said. ‘Shit, shit, shit.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Adam asked. Perhaps, he wondered, the man wasn’t respectable at all. Just another Los Angeles whacko, with a unique brand of amphibian-focused psychosis.

  ‘I think they’re all gone,’ the man said. ‘The army has killed ’em all.’

  ‘The army has… killed all the frogs?’ Adam said.

  ‘Yep.’ The man lowered himself to a crouch, picked up a twig and twiddled it between finger and thumb as he watched the water. ‘The Army Corps of Engineers. They’ve been down here trying to kill off an invasive weed. Using an industrial pesticide. I think they killed all the frogs too.’

  ‘Oh,’ Adam said, hoping the relief hadn’t come across in his voice. ‘I see.’

  ‘It’s a fucking tragedy,’ the man said, looking at Adam again. Bright blue eyes behind his glasses. Like Scott’s, Adam thought. Like a much nicer, kinder Scott. He was fairly confident that Scott wouldn’t give a shit about frogs.

  ‘They’ve been coming back. Just a few at first, but more every year. One of the last species native to the wetland here. Beautiful. That’s why Frogtown is called Frogtown.’

  ‘I don’t know it,’ Adam said.

  ‘A little way downriver. Up-and-coming. All that shit.’

  ‘Got it.’

  ‘I take folks out kayaking on the river. See the frogs most days. The army was out two weeks ago, and I haven’t seen one since. Lots of dead ones, but not a single one alive.’

  ‘That’s awful,’ Adam said.

  ‘We warned them…’ the man said, standing again.

  Adam searched his mind for something to say. ‘Did you say there was a wetland here?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh yeah. The river always was a river. They just straightened it out, down here in the basin. Concreted it into a line.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ Adam said.

  ‘1939. Roosevelt and the New Deal and all the infrastructure works. They did some good stuff, like making all the mountain trails, but a lot of bad too. The river always drained the mountains, just like it does now. But they had rail yards and all types of crap springing up. Meanders weren’t convenient. So, the Army Engineers came out, poured concrete into it and made it straight.’

  ‘Wow,’ Adam said, ashamed that it was all he could think of.

  ‘But it kinda grew back, gradually. There’s deep ponds in it, where the concrete subsided, and guess what? – they’re just where they used to be. Mother Nature tends to know what she’s doing.’

  Adam nodded.

  ‘I was really happy about the frogs,’ the man said.

  ‘I like frogs too,’ Adam said. ‘I used to go to Scotland a lot, camping as a kid. I had a pet one once.’

  ‘A pet frog?’ the man frowned.

  ‘Yeah. I found him in a boggy patch and kept him in my pocket. He was called Timothy, I think.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  Adam thought back. The memory made him wince. ‘Actually, I think he died. He just sort of… dried out.’

  The man’s frown deepened. ‘Jesus,’ he said.

  ‘Well,’ Adam said. ‘If I see one around…’

  ‘Sure, but maybe just leave it where it is?’ The man shook his head. ‘Nice meeting you,’ he said, setting off past Adam and heading upstream.

  Maybe if I wasn’t such an idiot, Adam thought, I could focus on some really important stuff like that. Maybe it would be possible to earn a reasonable living, running a charity that looked after frogs?

  He set off again, his legs tired, his thirst growing. A depth charge of sadness had exploded in his gut. His psyche had been scrubbed raw by the long night of drinking, leaving it alive to any gust of emotion. He didn’t want to go back to the home that wasn’t a home. A day of recovering on the couch, thinking of the past, resisting the temptation to drink. He swallowed the rest of his water, and wished again that he’d brought more.

  The past was not a refuge. It was a seductive illusion, and a prison. Its siren call was a lure and a honeytrap. Give in, and you let yourself sink away from the present, from life. And each time you resurfaced there was a little less of you left. Just because things had been good once didn’t mean they were OK now, or that they would be again. Just because you’d been good – been valuable – once, didn’t mean that you still were.

  The image of Erica’s eyes kept coming to him, blazing and sad all at once, before the elevator doors had closed on them. Another loss. But he deserved it. Seven years since the great mistake he’d made, of letting go of Sofia, and he hadn’t learned a thing.

  He could still picture Sofia’s eyes too, when it finally came out. They’d been to Lewes together, to see her parents over the first weekend in April. Adam had broken it off with Isa. Sofia had cut her hair into a fringe. Before they left the flat, he’d taken a photo of her, smiling – beaming – in the room they’d shared together. The last picture of her that he’d ever take. He could remember the fragile, doomed hope he’d had that maybe he could put what he’d done behind him and get on with life with Sofia.

  When they’d arrived at her parents’ house, her father told her she looked beautiful with the fringe, and he was right. They spent the weekend walking on the Downs, and driving south to Beachy Head, where the sea and the bright red-and-white lighthouse gleamed below them. They stopped in country pubs, talked of their friends an
d their plans. They were a normal couple, as far as she knew. He loved her. How could the horrible certainty of that fact not have become clear until after she was gone?

  On Saturday, Isa had emailed him. I thought you loved me? she’d said. How could you do this? In his vanity, he didn’t delete the email. Nor did he reply to it. It simply lurked on his phone, ready to read again when he had a moment, to feel the odd power of it as he did so, the little, fascinating pulse of pain.

  On the Sunday morning, before they got on the train to London, Isa had texted him. Sofia saw her name on Adam’s screen, and asked to see the text. He’d deleted it – with all the others – before she could.

  They’d almost reached Hayward’s Heath when he thought he’d persuaded her that Isa was flirty, that he may have been flirty back, that that was all it was. He was ashamed, he would never do anything like it again. Then, suddenly, she had grabbed his phone, was scrolling through texts, calls, then emails. She was so sad and so angry that he watched her scroll past the mail from Isa without noting it. When she reached the bottom of his inbox, she began to scroll back up, more slowly this time.

  With a sudden, sick punch in his gut, he realized the futility of it, and he told her.

  The train stopped at Hayward’s Heath. She stood up, ran to the door. He grabbed their bags and followed her. She collapsed onto a bench on the platform and began retching, her beautiful face distorted, her eyes wide and black and flowing with tears. People staring at him like something foul, knowing him to be the cause of this.

  After that, everything seemed to break into short, painful little fragments. Back on a train, telling her everything – or as much as he had to. Going numb with the pain of it all, like some psychic equivalent of passing out. On the Tube in London. Passing two of her friends – a couple who’d never liked him – her in tears, unable to speak, them looking at him, knowing, disgusted with him, thinking they’d known it all along. And probably they had, hadn’t they?

  Back at the flat, very briefly, then kicked out. A pub, two friends, oblivion, someone’s couch. All the years that sprouted, poisoned, from this.

  He sat down on the warm concrete bank and felt tears come. A little while after he’d lost her, he’d read her blog – the one that would germinate into the career she now had. She had written about what was happening to her, how art wasn’t much on her mind ‘when I feel heartbroken and sad like now my Adam has gone’. Why had he thrown her away? He didn’t understand himself, and he was sure he never would. It was as though he could never quite see himself properly, like a landscape too wide for the camera’s lens. If only he’d been able to fly above his life and see it all clearly.

  Why did he have this need to be wanted, and to possess?

  Standing up on his stiff, aching legs, he began to walk again. He passed under the Sunnynook footbridge, steaming around the pillars of which was a strong smell of urine. For a while, someone seemed to have been sleeping beneath the latticework of the bridge, atop one of these pillars. Living on a precarious perch only a few feet wide. There’d been a few possessions visible there, a sleeping bag, and above them some mad, sloganeering graffiti. Then, abruptly, whoever had been there had apparently gone.

  Adam looked up now, but all he could see was the shadowy underside of the bridge. Something caught his attention as he lowered his eyes back to the river. A tall tree, a little way further along. That was where he’d seen the osprey, he realized, when Erica had first pointed it out. He stepped out of the smell of stale, condensed piss and walked a little faster, stopping again beneath the tree. Looking up, squinting in the light, he saw that its branches were empty now.

  He sat down on the sloping bank again, the ache in his limbs worsening. He thought they must’ve been stiffened and over-stretched during his brief, tortuous sleep the night before. The water a few feet away gurgled and trickled, making him crave some of its sanitized form. Stupid, not to have brought more. He was a long way from the car now.

  He let the vegetation distract him, running his eyes over it. So much of it. Amazing to think it had sprung back from being concreted over, to this. It had broken through, reasserted itself, bided its time.

  Just then, taking him by surprise, he felt a small pang of hope. It rose in him like a weak flare, and was instantly distinguished by the blackness within.

  Still, he thought. Life did quite obviously go on, didn’t it? Whether you liked it or not. And happiness would probably grow back. In fact, his happiness had been a bit like a weed. Seemingly ineradicable, no matter how he mistreated it, how many chemicals he threw at it and how many of its roots he ripped up. Its resilience was almost obscene. It didn’t matter what impediment he put before it, it would grow around, keep finding a way. Another little flare rose within him.

  It was a bit like the creeper in the courtyard of the building in which he and Sofia had lived. Columbine, he thought it had been called. On countless weekends in spring and summer, a middle-aged blonde woman, the block’s busybody, had been out there trying to kill it, and had never once succeeded. Within a few short weeks, its tendrils would be poking out once more, coiling themselves around the more welcome plants.

  He’d thought that with each bad choice, the finite supply of happiness would be depleted. Now, he wasn’t sure it worked like that. Happiness seemed to keep finding ways back to the light, too.

  A growing noise from downstream distracted him. There seemed to be a lot of people gathered on the Glendale Boulevard bridge. There were shouts, and then a chant he couldn’t make out. He stood up, walking a little way up the bank to get a better look. There were police vehicles up there, flashing lights atop them. He could make out the blue, hatted forms of a few cops, standing around with hands on hips. To their right, on the Silver Lake side of the bridge, was a large group of people, some holding placards, all of them apparently yelling at the cops.

  Adam walked a little way along the bank, but the steep angle of the concrete was uncomfortable under his feet, so he dropped back down to the water. The voices grew louder. Someone was shouting through a megaphone.

  ‘Where’s your compassion?’ the angry, high male voice said. ‘Where the hell do you think they’re gonna go?’

  He walked a little way up the bank again. The cops, he could see, were clearing out the big homeless camp that had been set up along the river’s opposite bank for as long as he could remember. The path there led to a dead end against the bridge, so its occupants had presumably thought they weren’t bothering anyone.

  ‘Move ’em on, make ’em go, where they’ll end up, who fucking knows?’ the voice behind the megaphone chanted. There seemed to be thirty or so protestors, a short row of grim-faced cops keeping them away from the camp. On the path and the bridge, ten or so more cops were issuing directions to the bums. Adam watched as the painfully thin, overdressed men and women, their hair long and matted or short and patched, walked dazedly around their tents, like dozy, sedated bees around a hive. The cops seemed to be on best behaviour, their movements calm and unhurried, their voices too low for Adam to hear.

  Another van, parked up beside the cop cars and trucks, had a satellite dish on top of it. Adam could make out a man with a TV camera, a female presenter apparently speaking into it.

  ‘Where are they gonna go?’ the amplified voice screamed. ‘They’re just gonna set up somewhere else. Why are you doing this to them? How much is this costing?’

  There were raised voices from the police side, and one of the men in the line stepped forward, pointing and yelling something at a protestor.

  Adam was quite close to the bridge now. His car was parked on Glenhurst. Going back the way he came would mean a lot of extra walking. He was very tired, very hot and very thirsty. There seemed to be cars going over Glendale, so he assumed he could walk over the bridge on the other side from the protestors.

  He carried on along the riverside, the protest going out of view above him but the voices much louder now. The shouts and yells blurred together. Only the
voice from the megaphone, which was growing strained from overuse and emotion, was clear.

  ‘How much is this costing? Paying your wages today,’ it screamed, ‘could house all these people for a week.’ Then: ‘Kick ’em out, move ’em on, who cares where they go, so long as they’re gone.’

  Adam had almost reached the bridge. The vegetation faded out before it, and he could see the camp on the other side of the river now. Tents were coming down, the homeless people were climbing up onto Glendale, dragging possessions, helping each other carry shopping trolleys stuffed with junk. A young woman, who Adam often saw on the river, was sitting atop the bank, clutching her head and rocking back and forth.

  In the shade beneath the bridge, only a few steps away from Adam now, were a large Canada goose and her goslings, dabbling in the water as they circled her. She’d apparently come upstream under the bridge, and was heading towards him and away from the noise.

  Adam looked back up to the camp. One of the homeless men was holding a dog by its collar, and a cop was poised in front of him, left hand held out warningly, right hand – out of Adam’s view – apparently on his hip. God, Adam thought. Surely not resting on a pistol? Surely at worst a nightstick? The cop was shouting at the man, but his voice was drowned out by the megaphone.

  After a moment, the man let go of the dog’s collar. It ran straight down the bank into the water, heading across the shallows and towards the mother goose. The huge bird raised its head in alarm, then looked left, towards Adam. With a strange calm, he realized he was standing in the direction of her only aquatic escape route. As the dog approached, she spread her wings, hissed, and launched herself at Adam’s chest.

  The impact took the wind out of him. As he fell backwards, he felt a sharp pain below his left nipple, and realized she’d bitten him for good measure. Then he was lying on his back in the water, which momentarily covered his face, cutting out the world in a strangely peaceful moment of underwater silence.

  As he raised his head, the goose climbed over him and slid off his brow into the water. The smell of her blossomed in his nostrils, a fusty, choking mix of oily under-feathers and wild water. As Adam raised himself on his elbows, shaking his head and sucking in breath, the goslings scrabbled past him to their mother, squeaking in alarm. He turned his head to see them moving upstream together, until they reached a band of reeds and disappeared behind it.