Ann Granger

Keeping Bad Company

Headline, 1997.

'I went down to the canal. It was a visit I had to make. Albie's body had long been removed, of course. All that remained to mark his demise at that spot was a fluttering blue and white tape that had cordoned off the area. And even that was broken down. The strip of mud and straggly grass beside the concrete towpath was strewn with cigarette stubs and sweet wrappers and trampled by police-issue boots. But the visitors, both official and simply ghoulish, had all gone for the moment and I was alone.

Fran has come to place flowers at the spot where Albie, an alcoholic tramp she had befriended, had drowned; an earlier incident makes her doubt that it was an accident.

As I came to the end of my short act of memorial, it seemed to me I wasn't alone after all. I looked up quickly, thinking someone might be watching me from the railings atop the steep bank, or had come along the towpath unheard, or was even in one of the quiet houseboats. But there was no-one. The canal itself was covered with a scum of debris, everything from waste paper to discarded condoms. Water slapped against the houseboats as they groaned and creaked. Yet I still felt that tingling between the shoulder blades that you get when someone is watching

On a second visit to the scene her own life is threatened when a motorcyclist tries to run her down. 'Behind me a deafening crash had shattered my ears, a final screaming roar from the engine, which was abruptly cut off and followed almost at once by a mini tidal wave as the surface of the canal lurched and splashed up over the towpath and my fleeing feet'.