The blackness of the water moves in channels. The water is not all black. The water is not black. The water reflects that what is around it. I watch the water reflect it. The water looks black to me.
We picked our way down through the thicket. It was a place used to be other than it is now. There were boats that were made here. Or they loaded the ones up that were built in distant lands here.
They loaded them up with coal or stone, and sent them off down the river that curves (and disappears) here. It curves into infinity. What is round that corner. I don’t know man, I just load the boats.
The sky was obscured as we came out into the clearing. You could say that it was a shame that the sky was obscured here. You could say whatever you wanted; no one was around.
...
On the rocks the black weeds washed in the black water. I picked my way down in the mist to the waters edge. The phone had said the tide times, but it was higher here than expected.
The plan had been – the plan had been to do something else actually. But it just so happened to take this turn. The water lapped in and amongst the stones and bricks
which is what we had come for. I took the trowel from out the ruck sack, put on the blue plastic gloves, and started the work of turning and picking through that which was discarded.
We were after the ones with names on – or anything that took our fancy. His son had taken home half a Victorian cistern once on the Metro. He had said it was quality stuff that
when it had become apparent that the smell of it was bothering some of the other passengers and one in particular. He just said it and looked at him, and then looked out the window.
Did you bring the brush? Nah. Because the water here was higher than expected a lot of the good stuff we had been aware of the time before when we’d said we’d come back was
submerged. The bricks were discarded in strata which is a pluralization of stratum which means a layer or set of successive layers of any deposited substance.
Basically the better bricks to us were the older ones with names you didn’t find too often and these, at least in this section of the river, were deposited where we should have come earlier.
I stood up and looked down the river. The waters lapped in the channels and there were some large buildings across the way and a whirring sound like an alarm in the distance.
There was no breeze. Birds I didn’t recognize the calls of called. They were saying to piss off out the territory, and they were saying it how they were made. The sky was made. The clouds.
Last time we had come there had been a tile that he had wanted to get out of the ground but we didn’t have the tools then. He was working on it when I came back up the black stones and the
blanks and black weeds with a bit of a tile that said ‘Engla’ on it and another place name I forget the name of cos I left it. He took a breather and I started to work on it for him.
Sometimes they are so firmly lodged that you can’t get them up. Sometimes they are cemented in to something else and you can’t even see it and can wear yourself out trying for nothing.
Sometimes you break a piece of it off in the process. Bastard. I worked a piece of stone out close to it. Grasped at the tile and pulled. Nothing. I started in on another edge of it.
There were a few insignificant drops of pattering rain. Tottenham were playing Newcastle at St James’s. There was a structure by the water. Last time we’d come some lads were sat
smoking on it. The structure was something he would know about but you would have to ask him. He came down on the other edge of it now and worked at it there.
I can’t remember getting it out of the ground, but we did. I went back down to the waters edge. Because the deposits were no good, I started to turn up the stones under the black weeds.
This was interesting. There were things here. Creatures ran when I turned them up but I couldn’t see them. Were they weevils? If you got bit by one you got a terrible disease.
The ground sucked. It was mud, and the black water ran where it could. I was down on my haunches and looking across the water, I was almost level with it. I don’t mind getting caked up in it
but I wouldn’t have lain flat on the stones and weeds to be flush with the waters edge. I didn’t need to do that anyway. It was beautiful to see the way the water worked and went
in different ways – in the middle it seemed to be returning against the flowing of itself there were patches of it there reflecting differing intensities of light such that you could
just stop thinking about it and watch this. I tossed a nail into the black water and didn’t find an old sword or amulet with an inscription on account of I probably might’ve if I’d had a metal
detector in my bag. But that’s for them that are serious about this kind of thing. That’s for them in waders. (and it wasn’t even my bag, cos I never bring a bag, but that’s beside the point).
Continuing along to a different section of it to work on. There was an old slip way. You could see the sleepers where they lay in the mud. You could stand there and imagine it. I walked up
along an old cobbled path made of granite settes cos a man said on Facebook that cobbles are just stones of different sizes that are found at a beach. These looked more
defined. After a time of going this way, I turned back and found him in the remains of a something with concrete blocks. He picked the startings of a rose and put it in a sandwich bag.
He said that it might do well cos if it come up here just of its self then it was likely it would do well. He had another cutting, and another tile but he’d chipped it chucking it down.
He couldn’t believe it but he wasn’t that bothered. There was a path along the top that he was trying to get at and see. It was properly grown over and there was a couple of rails you could
just about see. He speculated on this. Was it the managers path? I pointed out the time. We had said we would only be a couple of hours. Aye, he said.
As we walked up the path he lit a cigarette. I smelt the smoke and he pointed out a gap in the fence.