The Devil You Know
Two forests and a river appeared at the foot of the stairs of the flats where she lived.
They weren’t there when she left home for work that morning, she was sure she would have noticed them. Was she staring at her phone too intently as she picked her way down the phlegm- and rain-stained stairs, through the gates into the grey street. Didn’t she look up?
They definitely weren’t there as she passed the discarded mattress and shelving, the To Let sign torn down by the council, past the giant LED advertising hoarding erected last year.
Two forests and a river: inviting her to adventure beyond the traffic, the urban coffee shops, the homeless man who lives in between the underground carpark and the lifts, the greasy grey pigeons who shit on her balcony.
She had yearned for more green, for more sky, for more air to breathe, for more beyond that which she had.
Two forests and a river.
She’d happily take just a babbling brook, all neat and fizzing, weaving and jostling its way through the landscape like a nimble rugby player dodging players on the field, she thought. Or a gentle English River meandering through the Cotswolds rolling countryside, all reedy banks and brown peaty water flowing gently over small smooth boulders rounder than a bakers bun. Or the stately Danube admired from the pages of glossy travel brochures: wide and regal, sweeping grandly through no fewer than ten countries, from its source in the Alps through flat lands and capital cities, carrying freight, and tourists past castles and forests, sweeping ostentatiously into Vienna, a River that understood its own significance.
That’s all well and good and you’ll think this is churlish, she thought, but what if if turned out to be another kind of River altogether. The Ganges: sacred but squalid, filthy and polluted? A testament to — and victim of — the tens of millions of people who live in its basin and rely on it every day. What if she partook of a holy dip at Varanasi, and encounter the bones of an under cremated corpse, or — worse still — cholera, dysentery, hepatitis A or typhoid?
Or what if it was the mighty Amazon: from Peru in the west to Brasil in the east, 4000 miles without one single bridge. The perils awaiting here were less manmade but just as terrifying to her: anacondas and pirañas and caimans lurked below. She shuddered.
I’ll take my chances on the grey of the city, of the car soot and the shopping trolleys, of the sirens, of the smell of kebabs and late night beers, of manoeuvring carefully past the drug dealers, and even the pigeon shit, she thought. So thank you for the offer of two forests and a river, but perhaps she’d just stay where she was today, she thought.
