Song Of The Thames.

Far beneath the surface of the river Thames, the flared gills of a thing long forgotten by the world snapped open. A dry summer had burnt its way across London, silt and muck and the detritus of lives uncounted settling like snow over Thames’ coiled form. Now that shingle of empty cans, dead rats and mud caked shopping trollies cracked, shifting as the first splotches of falling water hit the surface of the river. True rain had come at last, and with it echoes. 

Far away a man on a green folding bike cycled past an old woman with shoes but no socks. Three miles south of the river's winding bed a woman stepped out of her car and hurried into her office, hiding from the rain beneath a frail umbrella that tasted of too-thin plastic stretched between straining wire limbs. Thames took another mouthful of the rain, listening as each droplet spun a story of somewhere.

A tale of the city's thronging streets, told from every perspective as specks of water brought their stories to land on the river's surface. Thames could taste every edge of wet tarpaulin and scrap metal and every curl of fallen birch bark or drain-clogged hair. Buses roared across London's many bridges and many more potholes indiscriminately, surging through the wet air without pause. Across the river a child pulled herself up into the branches of a rain sodden fir tree, ignoring her mother's fear. Further afield a man shuffled along a shining pavement without hope of staying dry, lean and emaciated by years of street living.

Thames stretched it’s jaws wide, letting the taste of the river filter between its many borrowed and mismatched teeth. Relief, palpable in every cracked paving stone and sun-killed grassy verge, sang in the water. This drought, more so than its predecessors, had lasted too long. The rain trickling down through the city’s million new gutters tasted of fresh glass and wet, hollow steel. Yet more building works must have sprung up through the ever changing city since last it rained. The muddy flavour of the leaves and grasses patchworking the city in their ranks of parks, gardens and hedges was altered, growing in some places and shrinking in others until it was barely tangible. The taste of wet concrete and asphalt hung heavy in the water as it had for years now, but it too had changed it’s shape since the last spate of rain.

Curious (if so narrow an emotion could be applied to a thing like Thames), it uncoiled fully, turning stolen eyes skywards and waiting for the silt stirred up by it’s movement to settle. Clouds of mud stilled and light returned, twisted out of form and shape by the falling raindrops and their ripples. Ribbons of burning neon that formed words in the many tongues of man shattered into indistinct lines. The amber glow of the many posts that tore away London’s darkness was softened to a haze and made a thousand static setting suns by the rainfall. Squares of white light from the new buildings that shone and laughed and drowned out the stars morphed, came undone beneath the tiny, infinite circles now dancing across the surface of the river.

Thames ululated towards the surface in the east, down by the wharves where the scent of glass was strongest. It made its way to one of the old lungs of the city, docks calcified and empty and now remade a monument to reflection. London’s obsessive reconfiguration had run rampant across what had once been the docklands, the only reminder of what they had been the names they left behind. As soon as Thames' long, membranous fin broke the surface of the water it knew London had seen it. Thames was the colour of silt, it’s grey-brown skin mottled with the delicate turquoise of a kingfisher’s wing and the tangled shade of green copper would rust to if given half a chance. It was camouflaged well where it coiled in the water, for it had leached it’s current colouration from the river long ago, but London had seen it break the surface all the same. Thames was one of the few rivers who could still greet the stars, however choked they had become by city lights. It and London had long ago come to an accord. 

There were other rivers' souls nearby; Fleet, Walbrook, Tyburn, and Muswell curling down from the north, Sudbrook, Effra, and Heathwall hurrying through the valley’s underbelly to meet Thames from the south. All save Thames were shrunken now and sickly pale, pinned in the dark beneath the city that had closed in over their skies. London had grown cruelly self involved of late. Ever growing, ever feeding, it's spindle-fingered cranes hopped across the valley Thames had carved long ago and remade it’s reflection in the water, uncaring of the creatures trapped in its arteries below the ground. For all its halfhearted coiling and writhing each winter, Thames could not free the weaker rivers from the city's maw. It could not even truly want to. Such things are not in the nature of creatures such as Thames, who had long ago learnt deafness to the cries of buried things. Thames could not resent its dearest child for becoming what it had. London was a magnificent, boundless thing Thames had watched come into being, poisonous and beautiful and strange. How could Thames do anything but love it? 

It could hear the city coming in the rattle of the odd, suspended underground train that hung between glass towers over the water, and in rustling of the escaped crisp packets dancing in the wind. Thames curled, swelling with the rain and waiting for London to appear. When it did Thames laughed. The waters of the river crashed against the walls of the dock, the twisting metal things that joined Thames on the riverbed scraping together in a wordless cacophony only heard by two. London had come to meet it in the shape of a man. It had chosen curling dark hair and skin like crushed terracotta, but its lamp-like, empty eyes the colour of roman gold were as laughing and inhuman as ever.

London had created a light summer suit the colour of the city centre’s sandstone monoliths to go with its human shape that managed to look like it had been woven rather than grown. It sat down at the dock’s edge, swinging two human legs back and forth and almost looking convincing. Thames would have been impressed with the detail London had put into its current skin if it hadn’t been so busy being amused. It was smoking of course, a thousand car exhausts emanating from the city's maw as ever, but even this was disguised as a human habit. London took a long drag on a cigarette shaped chimney and breathed out, its smoke tinged with the rainbow iridescence of an oil slick. Thames smiled wide, felt the water droplets falling between it and London hurl themselves through the power vacuum as fast as they could and tasted their fear as they hit the surface of the river. London was the one to break the silence. 

The shuffling ranks of pigeon infested rooftops formed its words, their meaning lost to every creature that heard it but the one to which it spoke. "Human eyes this time?" It asked. Thames rolled them, and answered with the lapping waves and sucking mud it preferred to speak with.

"A summer swimmer's, fresh enough to see with still. You wear a full skin yourself."

"I at least made it from scratch."

"Why waste what's freely given?" Asked Thames with a cormorant's cry and the thousand reflections of the city's lights. London conceded with a smile, inclined its head.

"True enough. I enjoy the challenge of making my own faces, if only to pass the time." Thames laughed again.

"Time will always pass child. That is what it does best." 

London scowled, a half-frustrated crash of steel on concrete echoing around them as the city responded to its mood. "I remember when the first bridges were built across your river, centuries before I took the name Londinium. I'm almost 8000 years old in places, you can hardly still call me a child." It said petulantly. Thames rose further out of the waves and gently nudged its viscid head against London's legs (they even felt human to the touch), affectionate, amused. 

"And I have still more than ten times your years little one.” Thames said in reply, the words now spoken in a sucking coalescence of voices long ago lost beneath the waves. “I remember when the world was young. The sky burnt orange at midday and I was there when the moon tugged at the seas for the first time. I remember the journey here from my stone bed in the old country, when I carried my river with me in my pockets and followed the lines of potential to a new source. You are yet a young thing, but to say it is no slight. Enjoy your youth and all it’s shining restlessness. You will only have it once.” London fell quiet at that, the silence rippling outwards from the body it had come in to muffle distant footsteps and dampen police sirens so that they wouldn’t, for all their efforts, echo through its streets. 

Thames felt the change in the air before it came. Rain and all it’s rivulets of sweet knowledge, however heavy, must at some point slow. Clouds will always drift and fade, it is their nature as water’s is to flow. Knowing this did not change the acid flavour of longing in Thames’ throat, but it sank beneath the surface of the river all the same with a swirling, regretful goodbye to London. Thames followed the wind tossed clouds down past Tilbury to the edge of the sea, for it was more than the city’s river, more than the river’s soul. It reached the lower, waterlogged plains of Gravesend and Shoeburyness before breaking the surface again. The rain that met it now was green with the languages of things living smaller lives than anything to which the human world gave notice. An older song than the city’s, and a far quieter one. 

As it reached the widest part of the estuary Thames nosed at the meeting of it’s river and the far smaller one belonging to Medway, wondering if the other creature would come out to dance in the rain as the dawn came. After a long instant when all that moved was the world, it turned away, knowing Medway would not. The rain faded to a gentle mist and Thames swam down to the bed of the river mouth. Far beneath the surface, it settled in the mud and closed the rotting lids of its stolen eyes as the clouds parted fully, brushed from the skies by a playful sea breeze. The rain would come again, and when it did Thames would dance and live and sing the song of the river as it always had. Autumn was already on its way.