Government rolls in.

I want to fish on the river like a wild-man but I can’t see the bottom and all along the edges are yellow sharp-edged signs telling me to watch out. I want to eat the fish but I think the river is dead so my line dangles empty and forlorn while the hours melt together and drift into Saturday evening until my hands are blue and the world is dim out. I crunch back to the car and dismantle the rods, four pieces each, amazing how they come apart, something strong straight up one second catching the catchers then a couple of clicks and you’re lying down broken in the dark the next. I cram them into the trunk where there’s barely any space and I think I’ll come back next Saturday cos’ I don’t know any other rivers and even if I did they’re too far away, too beyond me cos’ this is my home and it’s where I belong. So I will come back to the river and throw in some more chum ’til the water is oily and flecked with flakes of flesh and I will hope and pray and breathe out the cold in clouds that hurry away from me and I’ll rub my hands together and wipe the water dribbling from my nose on the back of my jacket sleeve.

Soon the concrete recycling plant will be erected on the backs of labourers with glassy eyes and hunched backs and red faces from too much drink, just up on the scraggly banks of the river but across the way from that new housing development, where the parents are cradling their kids and having barbecues and kicking a ball around and all the while looking from their windows with red rimmed wet eyes, their minds ticking over about mortgages and plummeting house prices and the asbestos mist floating in the air and right down the lungs of their kids where it is waiting, waiting, waiting.

Sludge will pour into the river. It won’t kill the dead fish but maybe it will obliterate their bones and turn the soft reeds into Styx, so when the lone fisherman comes down in his dinghy through the fog clinging on the water he’ll look like he’s searching for a place to go off and sleep forever (and maybe he is); when the waters finally gone black the sharp-edged signs will go from yellow to red and I won’t be able to fish on the river no more.