Tom had just turned 35 the day he met the Heron. “I told myself,” she told him, not long after they had started sleeping together, “don’t jump straight into bed with this one.”

Tom kicked an empty lemonade can. “What’s wrong with this one?” he wondered, as they walked side by side down the soupy canal. “Glad to force a break with tradition,” he said.

Not long before this, Tom had moved into an L-shaped studio apartment, on the fifth floor of a building with a disused crane on top in a wild and marshy corner of east London. He bought plants, a bolt lock and the spices for a spice rack. He painted each wall a different colour and used peach-scented chemicals to de-fug the picture window that overlooked a nearby reservoir: a lake with an island of birds at its middle. Even from a distance you could see the shit in the trees. But before all that, Tom had lived south of the river, in a frigid attic room with an uneven wooden floor which he shared with a woman he had met one August evening among a crowd of people – mostly children – who had gathered to observe and cheer the demolition of a failing primary school.

After nine years, the relationship had ended. In truth, it had ended long before that, but the couple had anticipated ups and downs – as much a feature of premature adulthood as of pre-war housing stock – and had taken their sweet time with breaking up.

The first weeks slid by without detectable trauma: no bad dreams, no texts at 3am. But as they gradually became strangers, no more than paragraph-length anecdotes in one another’s romantic CVs, a cancerous regret had settled in. Tom was anxious, flamboyant, self-involved. He was convinced he had wasted his chances in life – whatever they were. Six beers deep one Tuesday evening after work, he stood up and announced to his friends (a little grandly) that he was mourning the man he should have been. The friends reassured him, and not for the first time, that the man seemed fine. All things considered.

“You shouldn’t broadcast your feelings like that,” said Daniel, a friend of Tom’s since university, gesturing for him to sit down. “You never know how soon you might want to disown them.”

Tom sat down. “I think I have mice,” he said, attempting to excavate the dust from the seams of a scampi packet. “I’ve been in denial about it up to now but last night I’m pretty sure I heard them talking about me.”

Daniel contemplated his friend with the eyes of a bored dictator, the kind of man who keeps on winning elections no matter what he does.

“We have some glue traps in the garage,” he said. “I’ll drop them by on Friday. They’re the very incarnation of evil but they do the trick.”

Tom lowered the bag from his face. “Just try to be there when the first one gets stuck,” Daniel said, picking up his phone to summon them a taxi. “The moment they realise they can’t get away, they start crying out for help. Before you know it, all their family, friends and former colleagues come running to see what the fuss is about, then WHAM.”

Tom flinched as the shutters rattled down on the bar.

“Pretty soon it’s mouse Treblinka.”

“Jesus,” Tom said. He felt a weariness rising inside him, though from the outside he just looked sad.

“It’s all over for me,” Tom said.

“You should be so lucky.” Daniel took his friend by the elbow and led him to the door. “Who was it gave you the impression that this nonsense ever ends?”

Though not overly keen on the outdoors, Tom strode with a woodsman’s stride. The Heron lagged somewhere behind, inspecting the names of canal boats moored along the water’s edge. The boats had names like “Slow Gin,” “Dawdler” and “this-L-do,” spelled out in a floral, big top lettering that acted as a kind of visual manifesto for those who dwelled inside: transient intransigents, self-appointed outsiders, handymen, yogis, ikebana coaches, consciously uncoupled from the daily grind, hitched by no more than the merest hempen thread to the fringes of society.

“One day we’re going to find a body down here,” the Heron said.
“I should expect so,” Tom agreed, his eyes fixed on the waist-high Alsatian that had emerged, with no owner in sight, out of the bushes that back onto the marsh.

“Canals, woodlands, fens – they’re famous for it.”

The dog lay down on a strip of grass, its eyes squeezed together as though laughing, its tongue unfurled like a whip. It was that time in late spring when the air fills up with little white seeds that clog up the drains and stick to the plants. The Heron had some in her hair.

“You know how people say that humans are the only animal that kills for fun?” Tom said, speaking without thinking.

“Sure . . .”

“Well, it’s bullshit. Chimps, for instance, have been known to massacre each other over land disputes. Dolphins form gangs and beat up porpoises just to let them know who’s boss.”

“That’s awful,” the Heron said.

“And what about cats? What about the pretty birds they’re always beheading? It’s not as if they’re eating them.”

“That’s true! And just because they’re cute and seem intelligent, we never call them out on it. They’re getting away with murder.”

“Literally.”

Just then a woman in a poncho, carrying a checkered laundry bag, appeared among the trees. The dog ran over to her. She held the animal by the neck and fixed its lead in place.

For a while the four of them moved in a line – the Alsatian out front – like a team of forensic investigators combing the ground for clues. Tom felt self-conscious. He tried to shift the conversation into a less whimsical register, applauding the council’s commitment to towpath maintenance and railing against the ugly block of flats – the Duplo-looking ones by the bridge – that seemed to have sprung up overnight. Not that the Heron was paying much attention. She was too busy scanning for corpses.

The Heron was 30 years old but she may as well have been 20. She was as spry and dauntless as a newborn baby lamb. She bore a healthy number of aspirations: to stay in shape (through selective eating rather than by exercise), to be spiritually receptive (someone had given her The Power of Now on the tube, though she hadn’t read it) and to play a leading role, whether invited or not, in the emotional lives of her friends. Chief among her objectives, however, was to avoid alienating labour at all costs and to strangle worldly ambition wherever it took root.

“My parents worked all their lives and hated it,” she said, one quiet afternoon, sculpting little clay ornaments and painting fish on blocks of wood. Sometimes the Heron took donations to the local charity shop, only to return the following day and wait to see who picked out her clothes.

She stood up and sat beside Tom on the bed. She left her sculptor’s wheel, newspapers and smears of black paint on the floor.

“All I’ve ever really wanted is for things to stay the same,” she said.

“I know what you mean,” Tom replied, as the Heron slid under his arm. “At least that way you know where you are.”

“Which is exactly where I want to be.”

An equally unstable logic applied to Tom, who had long ago given up his personal goals: to learn a language, to make a short film, to be nice to his mother. But unlike the Heron, Tom did have a job, taking after-hours bookings for a 100-seat community theatre. From time to time he stoked the embers of prior enthusiasms. He had 70 pages of an unfinished play about the fashion industry saved to his desktop under the not-quite-working title Empty Dressers. Beyond that, he tended to do suspiciously well at the bowling alley and felt an as-yet untapped urge to be involved in the preparation of bread.

The Heron’s real name was Clare but except for on rare formal occasions the name had been retired when she was still a teenager, substituted for the nickname given to her by her alcoholic father, who saw the same grey-crested bird every day during his post-work pilgrimage towards the Crown and Anchor pub.

“Just look how tall and spindly she is!” he cried, at family dinners or in the garden, as the Heron sat straight-backed among a circle of her adolescent friends. “She’s like a bloody heron.”

The Heron had grown taller than both her parents. She had also outgrown her older brother, a trespass for which she had never been forgiven. The name functioned like a badge, or like an unwanted item of clothing, something she continued to wear partly out of spite, but also to acknowledge her roots.

The Heron’s father died when she was 21. Her parents separated and he had died alone in a temporary bedsit in some lonely seaside town. Whenever she thought of him now, she remembered how he struggled to the kitchen counter every morning, reaching into the cupboards while her mother made the children breakfast. He’d take a large raw egg and crack it into a glass of whiskey, swallowing the mixture down whole. It was not a diet selected for longevity. And yet for all his faults, he wasn’t exactly an inattentive father. “The Heron” suited his daughter well.

Most Saturdays, Tom took his new girlfriend – if that’s what she was – to a Spanish café around a fifteen-minute walk from his flat. It was the first place they had eaten the morning after they met, mainly because they liked the quotation, attributed to Federico García Lorca, scrawled in pen on the window: “To see you naked is to see the Earth”.

Café con Amigos stopped serving food around 3pm. This irritated lots of customers, being so early in the day, but it provided Tom a perverse measure of satisfaction. There was something to be said, he told the Heron, with an air of authority grounded in absolutely nothing, for not always giving people what they want.

“What can I get you?” the woman behind the counter asked, it being only 1pm, and long before the cut-off point. Tom inspected the chalkboard menu that he already knew by heart. For a minute, he tried to imagine the transformation that the universe would need to undergo before he’d pick the bircher muesli over something more delicious and fried. His imagination failed. He ordered scrambled eggs with spinach and chorizo. The Heron ordered the bircher muesli and went to find a table. Tom added two cappuccinos to their order. “Cappuccini,” he said to the waitress, who handed him a maraca with a number on it. He paid the bill and sat down.

The Heron and Tom had met, somewhat depressingly, at a rave. It was only depressing, rather than entirely conventional, due to the small but growing number of their friends who claimed to have fallen in love, or to have made life-altering decisions – to become a reiki master, say, or to up sticks and move to Argentina – while under the mind-altering influence of pills or MDMA.

They both liked to take drugs, now and then, but after being subjected to a raft of engagement narratives caveated by the disclaimer, “oh, and by this point we were really fucking high”, they no longer believed anybody genuinely wanted to be shackled to each other for the remainder of their natural lives.

“Herons are the only British birds that don’t migrate for winter,” the Heron said, sitting on a bench that may in fact have been a pile of scrap timber, outside the party. Tom hadn’t notice her sit down. “We’re tough,” she said, flexing her arm.

The Heron offered Tom a cigarette but he said he didn’t smoke. Instead, he sat and gazed at the woman sitting next to him as though she were a brilliant creature that had landed in a park on a bright midwinter day. The Heron had a roundish face, bleached hair and dark roots. She was dressed in a baggy white T-shirt, blue denim dungarees and wrecked Converse trainers. Tom was dressed the same way he always was: terribly. He wore an old sports T-shirt that was too big for him and grey cargo shorts.

“That’s fantastic,” he eventually said, leaning back against the wall. The Heron smoked. She talked so that Tom could hear, staring off into the yard where groups of men and women were standing around, leaning on cars and tables, doing pretty much the same thing. Each time the door to the warehouse opened, a howl of music escaped. For a few brief moments, it seemed impossible to Tom that anyone could regret anything.

Suddenly he leaned forward. “What else can herons do?”

They did not have sex that night. After the six or so friends who had accompanied them back to Tom’s flat disappeared into taxis – including Daniel, his wife Megan and the Heron’s oldest London friend Alice – they made cups of herbal tea and lay down on Tom’s bed. By now they had entered that magical realm that exists exclusively between four and six am: two short hours in which people could get lost for days. The Heron laughed about Alice, who had rolled around and climbed on the kitchen table, screaming above the music: “Get a clipboard! Take down email addresses! I want everyone here to be at my funeral!”

As time passed, they talked about less and less. A pale bar of sunlight crept under the blinds. The window jambs rattled a little. The birds that had been chirping since three, fell quiet. Eventually they kissed one another and slept.

Herons are intelligent birds. But more impressive than their intellect is their ability to survive. The reason they are so often spotted on the banks of dirty tributaries in urban centres across both hemispheres is mainly down to their diet. Larvae, slugs, leftover kebab: every bit of swill the other birds won’t touch, herons eat it all. When humankind’s assault on the natural world is ultimately complete, there will still be herons, cloaked beneath their wings, waiting for whatever comes next.

“How’s the muesli?” Tom asked.

“It’s delicious.”

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

“I somehow doubt that.”

Tom was concentrating on his eggs. He took great pride in always being the first to finish a meal. “Growing boy syndrome,” the Heron called it. “An attempt to dress up greed as an achievement.” But he was only halfway done when he looked up and saw the Heron peering into her empty bowl. “Let’s go home and lie down,” she said, putting on her jacket.

Tom looked around. “What’s the rush?”

“The staff keep smiling at us,” she said. “I don’t like being smiled at by people who are being paid to do it.”

Tom put down his fork. “I never thought of it that way,” he said.

When they left the café it was still early, though a uniform greyness had settled on the marsh, giving the impression of night. A smell of wood smoke and diesel rose from the canal. The beacon pulsed atop the cut-diamond slopes of Canary Wharf. Tom said he was thirsty. Too thirsty, he insisted, to wait for a glass of filtered tap water back home, so they called into a newsagent to buy him a drink.

“What’s your poison?” the Heron asked, although she didn’t need to because Tom always drank the same thing.

A gigantic refrigerator ran down one side of the shop. It impressed them both to think that behind this newsagent’s forbidding exterior, garlanded with crates of bruised fruit – fruit they knew was in all probability far more delicious and better for you than the engineered specimens on offer at the supermarket over the road – lay this grotto of liquid possibility, beverages of every stripe, imported from across the globe to whet any whistle, with alcoholic, bio, caffeinated and sugar-free options available. And yet the drink Tom wanted, specifically a lightly chilled bottle of sparkling San Pellegrino water, could not be found.

“I don’t think they have it,” the Heron said, moving beyond the waters in the direction of the energy drinks.

“Of course they have it,” Tom said. “Everyone sells San Pell. It’s the best water there is – better, even, than Perrier, which is overrated.”

Tom realised he was giving a speech. “They just don’t keep it among the regular sparkles,” he said. “I think they stock it with the imports, something like that.”

“Why don’t you just ask?”

Tom made a face that implied he had no intention of asking, so the Heron did it for him.

“They don’t have it,” she said, pointing at the hefty Turkish man behind the counter, who stared straight back.

By the time they got home the mood had grown tense. It was as if the day had passed them by and there was nothing they could do to catch up. The Heron stood at the sink. She ran the taps over the dishes, remembering her father say you didn’t need hot water to wash up. Cold was just as good, he said, even if it hurt.

She gave up after rinsing a few plates and went to the bathroom. She pulled the flimsy shower curtain and did her best to channel gratitude, a technique she’d learned on YouTube, as the steamy water ran out of the pipes and over her head. Instead she wound up thinking about Tom. How he refused to take a compliment. How he measured himself against her in unpleasant ways. How he talked out loud about whatever puzzled him, never really noticing if she was listening or not. It could be lonely with him sometimes. Of course, there were things she liked too. She placed her hand on the shower handle but didn’t turn it off.

That evening they had clammy, furious sex – no doubt encouraged by the weather, which had deteriorated from a misty haze into a full-blown tropical gale.

When they were finished, they brushed their teeth and listened to the wind slapping up against the building.

“This weather is unseasonable,” Tom said, too tired to keep on pretending to sleep. The Heron agreed. She sat up and supported herself with her elbows.

“How much better do you think it needs to be in order to be seasonable again?”

“I have no idea. I’m not even sure what season it’s supposed to be. Yesterday it looked like spring, but now it might as well be winter again.”

“Which means it’s probably summer,” the Heron said, gathering the sheets at her waist. Tom could just make out her outline in the murky light.

“I don’t care what anybody says, the seasons made more sense when I was little,” she said. “You knew what to expect back then.”

The Heron got up to use the toilet, which was shared with the other studios on the fifth floor and located at the far end of the corridor. As the door clicked shut, Tom knotted himself around a pillow and tried to think about good things. Not the kind of things that were so good they became exciting – like sitting on an airport runway or brewing coffee – but things that took time to think. He tried to find a story he could tell himself and get lost in. That was the trick to sleep.

When he woke up the next morning the Heron was gone. He half-remembered seeing her leave, a blurry shadow and a voice, but couldn’t quite recall what she had said. Maybe she’d gone home to that poky rooftop room at the top end of Holloway Road. Tom had only been there once in the time they’d been together. The pigeons had kept him awake.

Tom got up and stepped into his sandals. He walked to the shower and soaked, then stood at the sink in his dressing gown eating spoonfuls of children’s cereal. Something made of corn and with honey. He brushed his teeth. There were no messages on his phone. He decided to go outside.

If you follow the canal north it will eventually become a river. If you continue on from there, beyond the warehouses, power substation, bus and lorry depots, the path itself will disintegrate. You will be in Hertfordshire. You will need wellington boots.

Tom did not go that far. Instead, he leaned on a bollard at the edge of a cluster of playing fields, stuck with rusty goalposts like staples on an old school desk. The day wore a pinkish, post-storm glow. A black cloud hung over Leyton. He watched scattered branches as they twitched in the all-but-undetectable wind, looking a little like birds’ legs. As for actual birdlife, five or six crows padded in circles. Tom took out his phone, then put it back.

A kid cycled by with his hands by his sides. Tom had never learned to ride no-hands. For a second he hated the kid, until a drop of rain distracted him. “Super,” he said to nobody. According to an app, there was a train he could take home but it was leaving soon and he would need to run.

After leaving a trail of puddles on the train floor, Tom put in his headphones and tapped his foot. He wondered if the Heron was thinking about him. “Probably not,” a blue sign underneath the luggage rack said. Rainwater baubled the window as the train slid over the marsh. It was a terrible day. It gave no guidance. He looked at the sign again. “Priority seat,” it said.

Back home, Tom peeled off his clothes and hung them over a radiator. He sat at the table and peered out at the reservoir. In the dim light, it looked as though the water had been drained, leaving nothing but the island constructed for breeding cormorants, a towering karst surrounded by a bottomless moat.

Tom pulled down the blinds. Some hours later, a message from the Heron finally arrived, explaining that Alice’s uncle had invited them to stay with his family for a few days, somewhere on the Norfolk coast. Tom threw his phone inexpertly onto the table, causing it to slip off the edge and land on the floor with a crack. As he bent down to pick up the device, he heard a sort of crumbling – like a scattering of pins on a polished floor – which seemed to come from inside the walls.

In the Handbook of the Birds of the World, a 16-volume encyclopaedia featuring every known bird species on earth, it has been noted that female herons, while generally monogamous, will sometimes build nests with sexually-inoperative males, only to sneak off from time to time and seek physical gratification elsewhere. There is a lot of useless information in the world. The Handbook also notes that in the United States, herons were formerly known as “Shitepokes”.

Tom froze. He assumed the watchful silence that all animals assume upon realising they have company, as a stringy, dirt-coloured mouse worked its way out of the stack of folded newspapers stuffed into a hole beside the fridge. Once free, the rodent moved in jerks and starts along the wall. Tom considered clapping, singing, beating the ground with a brush – anything to divert the little beastie from the yellow glue trap he’d positioned between the sofa and the wall a few days earlier. But he didn’t.

For no reason Tom could fathom, with no more than three or four inches to spare, the mouse stopped where it was and started nibbling the skirting board. With two sizeable wads of promising London real estate secreted in its cheeks, it performed an about turn and ran back the way it came. Before Tom could stop it, the creature was gone. He waited for a few minutes but it didn’t come back. Returned to the bones of the house.

Tom put on rubber gloves and wrapped the sticky tray in a bin liner. He removed a second trap from behind the door and dropped them both into the bin.

In his eagerness to feel abandoned, Tom had failed to remember that the Heron’s father died in Norfolk, close to where Alice’s uncle now lived with his kids, and that this was somewhere she’d been meaning to visit for years. Not to honour him, exactly, but to see where he had ended up. Instead, Tom was making dinner by himself, surveying the many gaps and breaches in the apartment as evening gave itself over to night. She had indeed been thinking about him. And she still was, only now her suspicion their relationship had less to do with what she meant to him and everything to do with what he feared he lacked, was becoming less of a hunch and more of a hole. It was like an empty reservoir that grew deeper the longer she thought about it, burying itself so deep she could no longer see the bottom, leaving her stranded, coerced by millions of years of evolution to adapt when all the while it would have been far wiser to fly away.