Estuary Prologue - Early Draft

I am developing a text pieces as part of my response to the Estuary Dialogue project. It is a fluctuating thing. At times - as you can see in an earlier post , it is a fairly short poem, but recently it has evolved again. Here is a extract of my present draft of a longer piece of fiction set in a near future:

Estuary Prologue

           I stand and listen to the renewed silence of the Stanford marshes. Look out at the Thames estuary, and beyond that the weak outline of Kent. Look out at the marshes I played in as a boy. With its huge flat sky and its marshland maze. The marshes I got a knife pulled on me. The marshes I came back to the day mum died, walking aimlessly through the needy mud in the stinking, salty breeze. The oil refinery still sits in the distance, standing warning tall in all this flatness.

           My filthy overalls hang on me as heavily as wet cardboard, the respirator hangs limply from my bruised hand. Barely able to sit up straight on the mud, my feet dangle toward the shore uncomprehendingly. I think about my name for a moment and how far I have come away from it in these last few days, how alien it sounds to my own ears.

            Pristine traces of curlews and waders like a repetitive scrawl in the mudflats. A conservation area of some renown throughout Western Europe. No sign of the birds now.

            I hope the others will come for me – I have no more energy. I hope someone will come to hear my warning, this thing that has marked me out for so many years. Hear my warning, make my sacrifice worthwhile. But more than this I want someone to hear my story. To believe in my memories, the ones that are mine now, even if this name is not.  

            I hope the sound I can hear is the beating of the new arrivals not just my own heart. I see everything becoming specks of electricity on the untroubled estuary waves. Huge indifferent river. Smelling of brine and rotten waste. And then coffee. The beautiful coffee from the Plaza café. How much I would give to be there now.

            I have to close my eyes, I do not want to. No sooner do I wake, than I close my eyes forever.