brookend

This is it. This is where the river - such as it is - ceases to exist. Upstream it glints where streetlights catch the surface, dark bars between in the shadows of walls. There’s a willow tree above the culvert drain. It has cracked and split several times over the years, been pruned back to Venus de Milo stumps, a dozen beer cans at her feet where her roots hold back the earth bank. On the other side a chain-link fence between concrete piers, finished at the top with three strands of barbed wire - a make-shift prison camp. A pile of rubbish on the bank behind me: footballs, Stella cans, a traffic cone. Only the T-Rex is surprising. The smell of cooked brakes. Tail-lights climbing the hill beyond the main road, blinking between trees. And only here right beside the cascade can I hear the river. If I step more than a few feet away there is only the road. The river vanishes from sight and hearing. Here comes a kid picking up leaves, throwing them at his dad. Grantner and Sterne Builders Merchants. All the car park meters covered in black plastic bin-liners and police tape, the western skyline glinting off the windows of the Vernier building above Brookend Street, slab-sided, duffer’s bond, roof-pitch at twenty degrees – a man passes behind one of them, a shadow on frosted glass. Dulux sign in Neon. HSS sign beside it. A row of shagged out double-decker buses collecting weather. And between all that the river, overhung with ivy-cloaked trees, plastic high in the branches shaking in the wind. Car park lights creating pools of light now, orange cones hanging upside down out of the night. Sycamores, ash. A fruity drinks bottle spirals downstream, catches a branch and bobs just above the culvert. The band of light on the western skyline is almost gone. A siren. It starts to rain. Raindrops on the surface of the water. The river folds and fractures and drops away, a rushing hiss of white bubbles turning over and over. The river bed: flint, dead leaves, tin cans, plastic. The river is blind. It can do only one thing - flow.

city cock-fight

I watched this cock-fight a few days ago on an urban stream - a short slice of open river between where this stream emerges from under the streets and sinks beneath them again. The culvert upstream is over a mile long. The lower one has a grate and would be impossible to re-ascend. These two war-torn fish live and clearly have lived a long time in this hidden stretch of river. They were circling each other, occasionally lunging, biting. Suddenly the bigger fish came from underneath and caught the other one across the belly and clamped down. It swam across the river, the smaller fish crippled and helpless in its jaws, pushing across the surface and then diving down until the smaller trout was pinned against the bed of the stream. The bigger fish held the smaller there for a few seconds and then let go. They continued to circle each other but now the smaller of the two trout began to gasp at the surface as if trying to rebalance itself, adjust its swim bladder. I watched for as long as I could but after a few more minutes they swam up under the culvert and were gone.