'What the river knows' by Angeline Tyler

By morning I have returned to my bed, spent. I lie reduced, crystalline, a weak sun tickling my surface.

Last night, lifted by angry rains, I swirled around her house, feeling for a way in with my wet fingers. Once I reached the sill I found a window, ill-fitting, and poured myself through, a rapid. I soaked the carpets, rose like the tide and seeped into the sockets, then I crept upstairs towards her in the ink-black, silent on each new tread.

When I departed, I took things I like in payment: a bejewelled Persian carpet, a new apple Mac, a cookery book with recipes for fragrant aubergine and peppered soup, out-of-date cucumber seeds, a yellow hose pipe on a reel, an unopened chisel set, a lampshade of purple silk with beads that go tic tic when they touch, screws she collected in a jam jar, a rattan sun lounger from a friend in Brazil. I swam them downstream and emptied them into the sea. 

But I left her an Astrantia root-ball from a neighbour’s garden, seeds soaked then stolen from poppy heads sown in wild rows between her Campion and Vetch, potatoes, carrots that will emerge between her raspberry canes, rich river water, decomposing leaves from the bank, rotting wood, nitrogen food for new growth.

I watch her through the dapple. She is distraught, disarmed and angry with me. By spring she will be grateful for this dirty baptism, a chance to start anew.