I was there when they hauled the first body out, crossing the bridge on my way to work. The police boat was moored to a buoy with three seagulls on it. The gulls were watching the policemen at work, doubled over in their greasy black cagoules, and pretty soon a few dozen spectators had gathered beside me on the bridge, watching with the gulls.

They kept getting the body half out of the water, then fumbling it and flopping it back in. One of them had got hold of the arm, it was jammed in his armpit like a baguette, and his other hand was buried in the folds of the dead man’s trousers. The policemen were getting pretty annoyed. They kept heaving and hauling, and it kept slipping back. It was like a tug of war with the river. The river didn’t give in.

Eventually, though, they broke the river’s hold. The body leapt suddenly out of the water as if it had been shoved from below, and all the policemen landed together in a heap on the deck of the boat. The gulls flapped their wings and screamed, but they didn’t take off. They were hard to satisfy as an audience. Like the rest of us, they secretly wanted something else to happen.

The body was out of the water alright, heaped on the gunwale like a soggy carpet, with only the left hand and left foot still trailing down into the current. When the policemen tugged on these, it became apparent they were sticking on something. Further exertions revealed a strange thing. The left hand and foot were attached, or fused, to the right hand and foot of another body.

They hauled the second one out with less effort. It seemed to come easier that time. This one was a woman, her dark hair as tangled as hair plucked from a plughole. Her left hand and foot were attached, in turn, to the right hand and foot of a third body.

The gulls were really watching now. So were us spectators. The policemen got the three bodies up, grunting and cursing over the water, but the left hand and foot of the third was attached to the right hand and foot of a fourth, and it became obvious that things were going to go on like this.

It was a human paper chain being dragged from the dirty river. Some people took pictures, but mostly they were silent. Nothing like this had ever happened before in our town.

I stayed on the bridge for about forty minutes, counting body after body. The policemen were really exhausted now. Their boat sat low in the water. When they got each new body up onto the gunwale you could tell they hoped they might have finally reached the end of the chain, but always another right hand bobbed up, another right foot. They started taking cigarette breaks, staring gloomily at the water. The seagulls watched, and preened themselves. Some of the spectators moved on.

I went to work, put in half a day, and came back to the bridge at lunchtime. They were still pulling bodies out, but new policemen had come to relieve the first lot. They’d got a flat-bottomed barge from somewhere, and already it was half full. There were men, women, children, old people, black ones, white ones, all strung together. There was something relaxing about the scene. It was one of those hazy, slightly luminous days.

Next morning they had to get a second barge. They brought in one of those sand-dredging boats from further down the river. Police divers bobbed in the water like seals, the sun glancing off their shiny caps. They kept swimming down to take a look, probably climbing down the chain like an upside-down rope ladder, and occasionally one of them came to the surface and shouted out to the policemen on the boat: ‘Still can’t see no end to it, nothing to do but keep pulling!’

The three gulls were still watching from the buoy. Or perhaps, like the policemen in the boat, they had been replaced by others.

And so it went on for a couple of days. We got used to it. ‘It’s a good thing they’re clearing that riverbed,’ people said in the place I worked. ‘They must have been down there for years.’

‘That’s probably why we got floods last summer.’

‘Must have blocked the drainage right up. Be a menace to shipping if you left it much longer. High time they got the job done, if you ask me.’

It seems strange now that no-one asked who the bodies actually belonged to. The police ran out of boats in the end, and strung the sodden human chain over to the river’s far bank and along the open ground by the rail tracks, utilising an empty warehouse to store them in. I suppose it was assumed they’d identify them there, so we wouldn’t have to worry too much about it. They cordoned off the riverbanks, but they couldn’t cordon off the bridge. People took to gathering there. Sometimes they packed sandwiches.

After some time, reports began to circulate about people disappearing.

Someone at work said her mother had vanished, and someone else misplaced a teenage son. The corner shop at the end of my road failed to open for business one day, and when no junk mail arrived for a week I realised the postman had stopped coming round. Certain doubts and suspicions began to be aired. People said too much was being unravelled. They said that perhaps our river of life had turned into something else.

I wasn’t affected by these murmurs, until one morning crossing the bridge I saw the unmistakable sight of the face of one of my ex-girlfriends rising from the water. I’d tried phoning her a few days before – a matter of a small amount of money she owed me – but she’d never returned my call. I watched her body pull smoothly through the river, breaking the surface of the water like an otter, just another body in the spooling chain. Her left hand and foot were fused, I saw then, to the right hand and foot of the corner shop owner.

By that time the police had rigged up a kind of winch, powered by a small diesel generator, to minimise the need for human exertion. The mechanism needed to be monitored constantly, as sometimes limbs or hair would get snagged. I ducked the cordon and approached the man on duty, who was watching the chain with watery eyes.

‘That one there’s my ex-girlfriend,’ I said. ‘She was alive a week ago.’
The policeman merely blinked at me. It looked like he’d been awake for days.

‘Can you stop the engine?’ I asked as she came slipping up the bank towards me, following the slick mud track of the others. ‘I mean, she shouldn’t be there. I know her.’

‘I’m sorry, sir, that’s out of the question,’ he replied, looking sympathetic. ‘We haven’t got time to stop, I’m afraid. The divers say there are loads more down there. We’ve got to get to the end.’
‘But what if it doesn’t end?’ I asked. It spooked me. The thought hadn’

t occurred until now.

‘Everything ends, sir,’ the policeman said. ‘Until then, I’m on overtime.’

By that point my ex-girlfriend had passed us by, and been reeled up to the warehouse. Through the open doors I could see a great spool of bodies revolving slowly, like a ball of wool being wound. I stayed on the bank with the policeman awhile, watching them slide past. I tried to spot other faces I knew.

One guy I thought I might have been to school with, but I couldn’t remember his name.

I couldn’t sleep for a long time that night, and then I awoke in the cold before dawn to feel the bed moving beneath me.

Then I realised it wasn’t the bed. It was me, sliding over the mattress.

I managed to flip the light in passing, but it didn’t illuminate much. There was no-one else in the room with me, no ropes or anything like that. I grabbed onto the post at the end of the bed, and tried to resist the pull.

But a large part of me didn’t want to resist. I wanted to go back to sleep. Sleep in my mind became conflated with the tugging I felt on my limbs, toes and fingers, on my stomach and groin, on the hairs inside my nose. All of me was going the same way. I could feel the blood pressing up against one side of my body, the saliva in my mouth making one cheek bulge. It would have been easy to let myself go. I’

d slide through the door like a wet rag and down the stairs past the doors of other flats, along the pavement, down the hill, through the damp grass of the park and downwards to the river. My right hand and foot felt the ache. They were lonely. They wanted something to hold. I thought about my ex-girlfriend down there, and about all the others. My body wavered in the cool air as the early light came up behind the blinds.

Eventually, the tugging stopped. It didn’t want me any more. I was deposited gently back down, and I felt that sensation you get when you push the palms of your hands together for a long time, until your muscles ache, and then let go so your arms float magically up and away from your body. A feeling of lightness and relief. I was very hungry.

I made myself some scrambled eggs, drank a cafetiere of coffee, and made my way down to the bridge. It was a cold, clear day.

A crowd had already gathered on the riverbank. The cordon had disappeared. People were blowing on their hands and stamping their feet to keep warm.

Everyone had the same slightly wild-eyed look, like horses spooked by a plastic bag. Their cheekbones stood out very clear in the light.

They were all standing very close to each other, the policemen mixed in with the rest. Many of those assembled there had woken to the same thing I had in the night, or else seen lovers or small children vanishing down the garden path. Some had had closer escapes than me: there were streaks of mud on their clothes and pyjamas, wet grass clippings in their hair. One man even had pond weed dried down one side of his head.

There weren’t very many policemen on duty, and the ones there looked ill at ease. Presumably some of them had ended up in the river too.

They were already letting the spool unwind. No-one had to give the order. All they had to do was switch the generator off, heave the chain in the opposite direction, and stand back to watch it unreel itself back into the greasy river.

We stood there for hours. I lost count of the bodies. They flowed past at increasing speed until the faces were just a blur, unrecognisable as people we lived and worked with.

They slipped back into the river soundlessly. I didn’t see the water level rise.
When the last body slid under the surface – or the first, depending how you see it – the whole crowd lurched forward a step, as if it had briefly lost its balance at the window of a tall building.

The three seagulls launched themselves from the buoy and reeled around, screaming.

The next morning I went to the corner shop to buy a newspaper. The owner was restocking the fridge with milk. The floor had been mopped, and the counter wiped down. There was sleep in the owner’s eyes, but he nodded and smiled.

‘I haven’t seen you for a few days,’ he said. ‘You been on holiday?’
In the afternoon, at work, I called up my ex-girlfriend. She didn’t answer the phone that time either. I guess she was out doing something. The money didn’t bother me much. I left her a short message.

Image by Tom Nobody