Walking to work along the canal towpath on Saturday morning, my gaze happened to fall across the water and it caught a glimpse of something so unreal that I had to look away to look again. A breeze was casting ripples on the water’s surface, and I waited a little until the air was still, the sight already receding into my imagination. The wind dropped and when I looked again, I saw her staring back up at me. She was as startled as I was, half tucked under a submerged bollard, an expression almost aghast. I had no time to speak to her, not even to find out how she came to be there, and I scuttled off to teach my improvisation workshop in town, my head freshly doused in happenstance and wonder. I had taken a couple of photos, I had zoomed in, but still she wasn’t real. She couldn’t be.
On Wednesday, I woke early and suddenly, bright sunlight calling me out into the day. The plan, a plan that had evidently come together entirely in my sleep, centred on the extendable painter’s pole I had used last summer to hoist my camera aloft into a flock of oncoming parakeets. Now it would have a custom attachment, fashioned on the fly from a handy coil of coat hanger wire that I shoved into my bag along with a pair of pliers. I had a sense that if she existed at all, it could only be early in the day, before the world had had a chance to deny her or hide her or explain her away, so I hurried myself out of the house while everything was still new.
The water was clear and calm. I could see down to the drinks cans, the plastic bags, the shoes and the slurry. A couple of nervous fish flinched and as I reached her, a gust of wind played across the water so I sat on the bench, a silly old man and a pole. A moment’s self-reflection is never a bad thing, and if anyone has thought to ask what I was about at that moment, I would have heard myself say “I’m waiting for the wind to die down so I can fish an imaginary baby’s head from the Regents Canal”.
The water stilled. Joggers slipped past, cyclists, a snake of hi-viz nursery children hurriedly shepherded by busy, distracted minders. “That man’s fishing”, explained one little girl, “he’s got a pole”. I had extended my telescopic probe down into the mud, just for the depth, just to see, just to reach her. I nudged her with the very nub-end of the pole and she juddered, the unchanging expression of wonder lifting a little in the water. I raised the pole, and I wrapped the wire around the end, trimming a length that I bent into a hook. I couldn’t quite understand the shape of her and I couldn’t catch hold. I played and toyed and fished, and flipped her over and back again, and the wind began to tickle so I pulled out my pole and I sat on the bench, trying not to feel stupid, trying not to get involved. She was fine where she was. I mean, she wasn’t, but it wasn’t my job. And then maybe it was. I reshaped the wire into a hoop, something like a hollow ladle, a thing smaller than her, but wide enough to cradle her. The wind paused.
I lowered my spoon, I scooped her up, and I lifted her. Up she came, with some twists of cable and some electrical components, all too heavy. She broke the surface, just, her mouth gasping in the air for an instant, and she tumbled down again. She was at least free. Up she came, clear of the water, into the world, and slowly, gently, onto the stone path. The back of her head was glittering with little pebbles and sand and snails, a glowing mussel and tiny crustaceans. All her memories wriggling, clustered, hanging. I slipped her into the thick plastic bag I had brought with me back then, before she was real.
I walked up the steps, away from the canal and onto the certainty of the street, stopping for coffee at a Turkish place just there, creaking out a few insecure Turkish phrases to fill the air with something. At home, I tipped all her memories into the pond and soaked her in a solution. I had read that denture tablets would work and she sat in the pyrex bowl on top of the microwave, fizzing.
