I sat, last night, beside the river. My kayak had filled with water and I left the group to empty it. The blackness came over me in a wave, and this came out.

I love rivers, but this will not be my end.

The river slipped slowly, silently past at a pallbearers pace. The bankside trees hung or towered alternately over the stream, wreathing their own reflections in a myriad of different greens. The sounds of the evening town were starting to fade. The children’s shouts from the park diminishing as their bedtimes took them to their homes. Even the constant roar of traffic began to fade and a respectful silence drew in. As the human noise decreased the sounds of nature seemed to grow in volume. Birdsong constantly narrating their lives, denoting battles for territory and the never ceasing struggle for survival in the woods. Fish jumped, each splash a life and death battle between the predator and its prey. Gradually, inevitably, the light began to diminish as the sun sank below the treeline. Colour bled slowly out of the trees, turning the darker greens swiftly to a mourning black, greying the lighter notes of the willows. On the far bank a solitary hawthorn, white blossomed for the spring, became a wraith standing sentinel over the quiet procession of debris. Much of what floated there was natural, fallen leaves and blossoms, grass cuttings, dust and twigs. Some was the careless waste of a town, too busy to observe or protect one of its greatest natural treasures: bottles, cigarette ends and plastic wrapping, heedlessly dropped from one of the three bridges that interred the river beneath the daily routine of the town.

Beneath a shrouding willow a dark shape moved, a sodden lump of detritus in the river, stirred by a small current or the questing mouths of hungry fish. A shoe detached itself and drifted to the bottom, impaling the mud of the river bottom with its heel and beginning its own journey into decay. Catching the main current he moved slowly, sedately towards the weir by the sewage works. He turned lazily over and rolled, showing now, in a streetlights jaundiced glow, a flash of floral print and then, in the lightning flash of a passing headlight, a patch of lace. In the sepulchral darkness, he bumped up against the concrete of the weir barrage, too large to wash over. The white of the concrete formed a tombstone commemorating his lost dreams and impossible futures. A heron stood below the weir, watching the river, its lone vigil the only respect paid, and he floated on, wreathed in leaves and empty bottles, awaiting the morning’s discovery and oblivious to the coming scandal.