The Flow by Amy-Jane Beer

Author:Amy-Jane Beer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472977373
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2022-06-21T00:00:00+00:00

Heron

I’m swimming in a quiet backwater near a little weir with a glassy chute. There’s a huge willow leaning over the water, and an oak with clusters of tiny, pea-sized acorns and tentacle-like roots spreading left and right along the bank.

The weir means I need to swim downstream first – something that always makes me a little nervous, mindful that swimming back will be much harder work. I don’t go far, turning around after 50m or so, just in time to see a heron alight at the water’s edge a short way upstream. He parachutes down, placing, lifting and placing again his feet with such ostentatious precision that I’m reminded of a concert pianist’s hands. I think he’s a male because his back has a particularly long cape of the fine plumes known as aigrets, and he seems keen to take particular care of these, affecting a sort of fastidious feathery origami, folding and refolding his wings before finally adopting a hunting pose. This presents me with a dilemma, because I know herons can’t bear to be watched. They never let me get anywhere near them in a kayak, and if I want to watch one from the bank I find it helps to do so sidelong – don’t let them see you looking. This one has gone through his entire settling routine, unaware of my presence in the water just a few metres away, but there is no way I can get back upriver without disturbing him.

No creature on Earth expresses disgruntlement more eloquently than a grey heron. I think of Paul Farley’s brilliant sweary poem The Heron ‘ … fucking hell, all right, all right, I’ll go to the garage for your flaming fags,’ and resign myself to the recoil when the bird recognises me: the glare, the grudging launch. I speak quietly.

‘Sorry, Sir Heron. I need to go past you.’

The bird plays his part to perfection, flinching, scorching me with yellow-eyed disgust, and then after a two-second pause in which I fail to drop dead or vanish, he hunches into his wings as if hoisting on a coat he had only just shrugged off, and hup-hup-hups himself into the air, steeply, to clear the trees on the opposite bank. A spatter of white shit strikes the leaf canopy and I chuckle.

‘You missed me.’

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