A bike; a marsh. A tale.

The marsh is always simultaneously intriguing and menacing. Fighting my way to the seas’ edge, I’d slurry into mud-banks, tough grasses springing me awry. I cherish those dark tidal waters; that line where sky & sea blur, becoming one. Interstitial spaces are always intriguing. And yet the route to that edge is also a time of unease. Silly things spook me: fleeing me underfoot, bird alarm calls, disconcerting, adjacent mud plops, an old bike frame at the edge of a path, both, I’m pretty sure, fresh since yesterday. Well-worn feet habituated, always heading out the same way, maybe this was simply the grass susurrations, the water pools shimmering jewels and I, easily confused.

The bike frame though, no, that was new. How had it even got here? Hundreds of yards from marsh boundary; equal distance to the shore-line. But not just the frame. Closing, apparent that it is the whole bike. The tires, intact, the pannier, spruce, the bell, chromed shiny. The today-ness of everything strikes me again. Mud, the salt water hasn’t even touched this bike. It’s spanking new.

I’m not an imaginative man, you know? No, placid, calm, tranquil. I do a job, I take my Friday pay packet home to my wife and our second, lovely, new-born and I eat the meal that Avril has cooked. Stolid, an adjective people could use about me. And I don’t mind that. It’s styled very close to solid, because that’s what I want to be for my family now. Solid, reliable, a rock on which they won’t flounder. 

Yet I’m glancing around — jittery — though it’s obvious there’s no one else on this flat plane. A second, cautious, look around. Superfluous surely; this place as level as anywhere on the planet which is why the water comes up on you so very, very fast after all. Despite that, there’s still this burgeoning, hardening feeling that the owner is neighbourly close. Where was the rider, are they still near, spying?

It’s a small bike, a woman’s maybe? No, those handle-bar streamers, a kid then. Has a friend said about their son or daughter not getting back for tea yesterday. Is there a “missing child” posting on the local Facebook group (something I never look at but Avril inhabits?) Maybe I should call, ask her? But now the bike seems to shift as I look again. It’s simply the water, surely, as the tide moves it in. I note there is a light, front and back. Still lit.

And, now, now, of course I do recognise this thing. It’s Josh’, our son, lost adjacent here, from when he was 7. And when he was still alive. Which explains the hands, tugging, ratchet-strong at my ankles. I couldn’t help him then. He won’t want me to leave him now. That screaming I did before for days, that same throat-tearing rasp, repeats. Black, chocolate-rich mud, curiously skin soothing. Sliding grass, my face shroud. Sea, strangely serene. I’m a placid man. Calm. Tranquil.

“Hello daddy…”