The inflatable banana caught my eye again, drawing my attention from a stretch of riverside towpath that had been mined and undermined by rabbits, tunnelled by moles and pummelled into unevenness by the hooves of the Travellers’ horses that were long before left loose to run here.
It was on that same walk the day before that I’d first seen the metre-long, primrose-yellow plastic banana lodged in bankside vegetation, as clean and bright as the moment it had been laughed down a weir or launched on the water to see how fast this bent canoe would go. Did they wonder if their joke would carry to the sea, the open ocean? Did they think the river a sink that would wash it down the plug hole? Had they even heard of microplastics?
Unable to retrieve it, I walked on, still simmering, only to be distracted again a few metres on by a snatch of movement on the surface of the river. My brain was computing the possibility of a rat or water vole among the vegetation, when up it burst out of the water, the head of a giant pike, the length of my hand. It opened its long jaws in a great yawn, to display a mean row of jagged teeth. It fell back into the river, then up it came once more, baring the insides of its pale, membranous mouth. I looked into the big, black, blank dead eye of a fish that was very much alive. There was something terrible about this predatory fish out of water, so strong and adept in open air, breaking loose from its watery domain.
The pike sank one last time, then rose to leave the rim of its jaw glowering on the surface, and there it stayed. A fish expert told me later that this might have been a male engaged in some ritual of breeding activity – a show of strength, perhaps? And then I thought of this animal’s descendants decades hence, opening wide to swallow small fry, the little fish that would themselves have gobbled down bits of waterweed, mixed in with a fruit salad of plastic banana.
