By the time that the river finally spoke to me I’d almost given it up as mute. I’d spent weekends and evenings squatting in the muddy riverbank. Getting my trainers dirty. Pulling up spokes of grass and sticky weed leaves that turned my fingernails green and yellow. I would sometimes chat with thrumming insects, or pass the time companionably with shrill local birds. The birds harvested my insect companions. Maybe the insects were ignorant of the dangers of those red and black open beak triangles swooping towards them. I didn’t warn them. This is the natural rhythm of the riverbank, and I thought that I must keep time with it if I were ever to hear the river. I tried my best to tune out the burble of the fauna and the grumble of traffic passing over the bridge. I would sit with my head tipped to one side, ears focussed on the meandering folds and brown swirls of the River Hull.
This river splits my city clean in two, dockers’ East to fishermen’s West. Sometimes I feel as though we are two cities, sharing a moat. Further towards the mouth of the River Hull, where this winding tongue of water kisses the River Humber, are my favourite sections. There’s the part with the solid dark cocoa smell. There’s the part with the permanently raised halves of a once-was-bridge, now mossed over and shackled to each bank. I waited upstream, where it was quieter, where I could sneak up close to the water.
The riverbank animals and birds were surprisingly nonchalant about me, a human with whom they could converse. I tried to copy their indifference, but I could never control that twisting in my stomach when one would tell me, ‘hello again’.
I sought their advice on how to speak with the river. But their general disinterest in my presence extended to this topic. If they could shrug, they would have. I could never jump to my feet and, demanding answers, exclaim, ‘This is a conspiracy of silence!’ Any confrontational tone in my voice or posture caused even my most talkative contacts to scatter.
I varied my approach now and then. With my notepad and pencil stuck in my back pocket, I would pace up and down the bank flinging questions over my shoulder as though answering were not optional. Another tack that I trialled was to crouch in a self-made hide. Putting a finger to my lips to ask for complicity from my winged or furry comrades, I would pretend that I was not there. I thought that perhaps the river kept quiet when I was around.
The entire idea was absurd. It didn’t work. My belief that the river had a voice began to waver.
And then on Saturday the twenty-seventh of July (according to my notes), I heard a definite sigh. I knew that it must be the river: the sound curved through the air in the same implacable undulations with which its originator cut through my city. I pulled out my pencil, found an empty page in my notebook, checked the time on my ‘phone and wrote with a shaking hand, 11.37. The river expresses an audible heavy sigh.
I had learnt to hear the river.
I cleared my throat. Nervous sweat prickled under my arms and across my hairline. I ran through my pre-prepared questions in my head. My questions were stupid; I discarded them all. With a dry tacky tongue I barely remember asking, “What can you tell me?”
