"Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch the miller's daughter,
Jack fell in and Jack did drown, so let's grow old together.
London bridge is growing old, growing old, growing old,
Pass the arch and pay the toll, life, soul, gratis."
That was the Old Man of the River.
You could hear him singing, sometimes, as he poled his makeshift raft
of old boxes and buckets and logs and fiberglass up and down the lost
river that flowed aimlessly through the city, like the tracks of a new
arrival trying to find something to stay their feet. The river didn't
stay, but it didn't go either. No one had ever been able to follow it through
all its windings. A grating always stopped them, or a low sewer pipe, or
a decayed and rusted vehicle or less recognizable obstruction sunk into
the sluggish channel, or else they found themselves back in a place
they'd been before. The water was gray, flat, opaque, even in full sun;
under streetlights it swirled as if oil or refuse floated on the
surface. Few ever came near it. The faint sounds it made were not those of
running water, but a hungry, sucking sound, like breath. If you stayed near its
banks for very long, a sinking sensation settled into your stomach, as
if it was slowing inhaling you from below like quicksand. Few things
ever floated on the water, and most of them were unrecognizable,
strange forms of twisted building materials and items that seemed to
have been sogging along the current for so long that they had forgotten
what they had been and whether they had ever possessed any purpose.
The water had no scent. No one mad enough to drink it could remember
having done so, though someone must have seen them do it: here and
there, scrawled upon on the embankments and concrete walls and
barriers that followed the channel, black and colored writhing swirls
of mostly unintelligible graffiti resolved themselves into one word:
Lethe.
The Old Man of the River didn't know that word. He knew others. Taliesin, "who remembers", though he could never tell you what. Avalon, the most frequent stop he named when calling out the names of random streets (none of whose signs matched his words) like railway stops as he drifted slowly by. Charon, he would say, some nights. Ferryman. Did you need passage? He was a kindly soul. If you didn't have money, he might ferry you across anyway, although he had peculiar ideas about what constituted a destination. He might even give you two mismatched coins, which, he said, were to cover your eyes when you had trouble sleeping under the city lights.
You might be in the City for years and not hear of him. Or you might meet him often. Not that you usually met him in person by accident; you had to follow the voice. It would drift up echoing through the alleys and byways like the distant sound of church bells ringing, a pale thin singsong too deep to match the children's rhymes it parodied, in minor keys and melodies that were a ghostly refutation of the original tunes.
"Humpty Doodle had a great ride,
'The lobsters are coming!' he broke down and cried.
}
Ride a cock-horse to Avalon's shore
Bide, bide, bide.
All the queen's horses and all the king's men
Sighed, sighed, sighed.
She offered him curds, she offered him a way,
But the queen was a spider, and he would not stay."
Follow that voice if you can. Follow, and soon you'd find yourself at a bridge--not The Bridge, of course--or a line of shops edging the river, or a place where a street parallelled a drainage canal. There he would be, a bent dark tattered figure in a patched greatcoat, poling along his barge with a slow, stately rhythm that never varied, never changed, so that you'd have to run and hold your breath and jump down over a narrow emptiness of gray water to join him. There was usually no one on the creaking mass of junk he called a boat except himself. Blankets and rags were scattered over it like a nest, and in the center, in a trash can half sunk into the raft, there burned a low fire. Its flicker made wooden embers of his craggy, shaggy face, which was hardly that of an old man, in spite of his nickname, only old in the way that anyone could become who spent much time in the City. His eyes were deep-set and pale blue but always shadowed, his jaw and chin and mouth and nose were broad, his skin the color and texture of tanned leather, and his mane of dirty brownish-blond hair with gray and red streaks tumbled around his shoulders like a ruff, joining up with whiskers that lined both cheeks, and with his bushy eyebrows. His voice was never the same twice, although always deep, and always disturbingly suited to the children's ditties twisted by his strange inner vision into prophet's riddles.
"As I was walking to St. Ives, I met a swan with seven lives,
And when it was dead it would sing,
And when it would sing it would die,
And when it was only halfway dead
It could neither sing nor cry."
He was always expecting you. He was never really surprised by anyone or anything said. He himself said little, and you could never tell from his tone whether he was laboring under an aching old sadness, or an otherworldly joy too quiet to express. Mostly he just sang these things which made no sense, but stuck in your mind for years anyway, more clearly than anything ever said by a loved one or mentor.
"Twinkle, twinkle, little scar, tended long and carried far,
Like a beacon, proudly shine, in the sky and bide your time,
When the bough breaks, the truth will out:
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down."
Taliesin had been alone now for some while. No travellers had stumbled across his strange highway in what, even for the City, was a long time; no scroungers had come to his fire; no lost souls had come to seek passage. Lethe's forgetfulness had taken them, perhaps, or they had passed on to Avalon, as he put it, when he thought so far as to wonder where people went. But he remembered every one of them, in his own cryptic and melencholy fashion.
"Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?
With feet and fans and shattered snakes, and faces we used to know."
He did not worry; he did not wonder much. He watched the water slide
past him without touching him any more than he left footprints on the
river. Loneliness was his symphony, and solitude his favorite tune.
Listen.