City Beach

Before daytime, patches of mist linger over the river. Only orange lamps and their squiggly reflections pierce the pervasive greys. The water breathes in and out, stroking the shore. 

'You can't be half-pregnant,' is a popular bizspeak aphorism and to be both day and night is just as impossible, so the liminal states, dawn and twilight, are treasured for their mystery and transience. The intertidal reach is analogous, neither sea nor land, and equally ephemeral. Twice a day land is dreamed; twice a day it is drowned by insistent tides.  Their clockwork regularity is out of phase with the clock; high tide accompanies breakfast one day, then lunchtime, then supper.  Perhaps life would be more harmonious, lived as it is in proximity to the sea, if we observed the rhythm it implores. Some days the barrier is closed and the moon's pull defeated. Then the beach dries, deprived of moisture, small cracks appear: temporary desiccation. Lugworms crouch in their burrows and gulls strut indignantly, baffled by the famine.

The sweet scent of seaweed exhaled from green-slimed rocks is a reminder that this river estuary is the coast, a finger of ocean penetrating the city. There are fish, and therefore fishermen. Spaced at fifty metre intervals, just beyond calling distance, they slump on canvas chairs, glowering mutely at the water.

'Caught much, mate?'

The response is unintelligible. The purpose is not catching, it's being. Fishing Zen.

The beach seethes with maritime detritus discarded as liberally as space junk. Plastic packaging, wooden spars, rusting cans. Shards of glass recall hopeful bottles tossed overboard; fragments of brick, now as porous as sponges, remember lost edifices; a bald tyre nudges the sand teasingly, unwilling to strand.

After the storm, denuded branches prickle the beach: wreckage from an upstream tree felled by the wind. Unaccountably a battered Punch and Judy stall is deposited, its grotesque figures brackish and fading. Bruising waves have scoured the beach, shifting mud and rocks to reveal metal tracks, extinct conduits for launching vessels from the pounding shipyards, now erased from all but memory. A girl in a red jacket laboriously scrapes letters in the scant sand with a stick, a cryptic message to the encircling buildings and the planes above. Her father throws a ball and a dog bounds into the shallows to fetch it. Children paddle raucously. Beyond in the deep channel, the dog-like head of a seal surfaces, scans the horizon and is hauled under, like a periscope.

As the light fades, the children are rounded up, shivering under thin towels. Colour seeps away until all is suffused in blue and deepens to indigo. By evening, the river belongs to garish party boats, the flashing lights and pulsing beat a substitute for the forgotten industrial clamour of Docklands. Later an ominous heron flaps silently while the orange lamps guard the night.

© David Thompson 2016