Mary doesn’t know this.

She lies in a narrow, railed bed amidst the faint smell of alcohol wipes and lavender scented talcum powder. The curtains breathe in and out. Somewhere a television is retelling the weather. She drifts. She’s small, sitting on the red step outside her grandfather’s bungalow, her knees dusted with dirt from the cobbled street. She’s twenty and the Thames mirrors the fire of a plane descending from the sky. She’s sixty, alone, the kettle whistles on the hob. The kettle stops. She’s ninety. Breath in, breath out, with the small rattle, nurses learn not to hear.

The room moves almost to silence; the only sound she hears now is the thinning of her own breath. She feels a warmth on her forehead. A shadow leans over her, and what touches her neck feels at first like a needle, a vitamin shot, a blood test, but it’s not, this isn’t a nurse. The pain is immediate, private, shameful. She draws in against it and tries to push away the hand, but her arm is too heavy and anyway, it’s not a hand anymore, it’s a mouth. She hasn’t been kissed in years. Something opens inside her, not despair, not fear but thirst. The mouth leaves her neck and finds her mouth. A metallic taste hits her, like old coins mixed with salt and rain. She takes what is given. A warmth runs through her she never thought she’d feel again. She surrenders to sleep but sleeps without dreams.

When she wakes, night has changed its colour. The room is the same and yet it’s rich with a vibrancy she never noticed before, the medical tape smells of peardrops, the plastic cups reflect the creeping moonlight like the moon itself lives by reflection, there’s a dark handprint on the moss-green curtain, not a stain but a burn-mark. She hears the lift cables count their floors. She feels her own tongue search for the cut on her lip to find it has closed. She hears someone far away whisper a prayer in a language she cannot place. Then the thirst comes.

The rails no longer grip her. The cannula lies on her sheet like a skin cast aside by a snake. Her feet are sure in their step. This startles her. The corridor opens before her as if she’d owned it all her life. She doesn’t look back at the pillow where the imprint of her head still rests. Down one floor, then another. She moves without sound. A porter pushes trolly laden with bin bags so shiny black they could have been pulled from an oil spill; he does not see her. The doors part to give her the night.

London is nothing like the London in her head. It’s sharper. Even the river seems awake and alert, its surface kissed by the breeze. She can smell wet pavement, fried onions, hatred, love and lust. She knows what she is seeking but she’s ashamed of knowing. Steps worn by centuries of feet lead her down to waterside. She follows the curve of the embankment past a pub and a chorus of late-night laughter, past two men who stand smoking as if they’ve been there forever. She sees their age through the smoke. One is almost young the other almost old. She moves past them, they don’t turn their heads.

The girl appears almost by mercy. She is quick and alone and walks with her phone lighting her face from below. Mary sees the pulse at her throat. She knows she should step away, should break the spell by asking the girl the time, she should say “child, go back to your friends.” But she says nothing. The girl looks up, and as their eyes meet, Mary is sure she sees a recognition in the girl’s eyes, an acceptance of what is about the happen.

Mary doesn’t remember crossing the distance. She remembers the heat. The first touch is light, almost careful, as if Mary were the one who might bruise. The throat gives. The mouth finds what it wants and wants more. The body in her arms makes a small, surprised sound Mary will hear later. Then the sound is gone. The girl’s hand opens and closes once against Mary’s cardigan.

London does what cities do. Lights continue to streak the river. A distant siren sings along the bridges. Music moves from one beat to another out of cars driven by boys playing men. Mary lifts her head. The girl is on the floor like someone who slipped. The face looks older now. Mary knows that she has entered something she doesn’t know how to leave. She’s not a woman who cries easily and tears would be no help to the girl, who is gone where apology and regret are unable to follow or beg for forgiveness. If she did cry, it would be for the little red step, for the pilot crashing through the blitz, for the river’s patience, for the fact she is still here. But, she doesn’t cry. She runs.

There’s no word for the way her body answers when she asks it for speed. The streets appear long and then short, wide then narrow, as her feet take them. She cuts through an estate where a lone fox examines her with a slow look of unease. She follows a canal and leaves it for a road with lorries, passing like moving walls. She goes east because east is the direction the water doesn’t end. She thinks of the long reeds of the marshes, even though she hasn’t seen the marshes since she was a girl when her grandfather took her to a bird hide and called the bird names as if he were calling to old friends to introduce her.

As the grip of the city loosens, she tastes the bliss of sweet air and crushed grass. The ground beneath her feet softens. She keeps going until the air opens like a gate and there are no buildings casting shadows over her, it’s too dark here for shadows anyway. Real dark. The stars are alive and almost obnoxious in their beauty, a beauty which now feels to her a knowing judgement. She steps onto something which isn’t quite a path, but a passage made by something that does not mind getting wet. Mud accepts her like a she is the guest it’s been waiting for and doesn’t mind that she is late. She moves through the shallow water. Egrets stand like folded paper in the dark. She reaches a channel with a slow stream of reflective black water, lit calmly by the full moon, and sees in it a face that is at first smiling and real but quickly becomes evil, trying on a face.

Thirsty again, she thinks of the girl because the body remembers what satisfied it. She swallows the thought down as if she could bury it by will alone. The channel at her feet seemed to whisper. Something stirs like rope under the surface and breaks it with no ripple. She kneels. Her hand goes in and closes around an eel, and when she lifts it into air it glows with a sheen as if brushed with oil. She bites where the neck would be if it had a neck. Warmth moves into her, not the same as before, but near enough to stream the desert that had started to climb her throat. She lowers the eel back and it slides from her fingers.

Fish come because she has learned to be still. A perch bumps her wrist, and she takes it, drains it and returns it; blood is blood. There is a taste of riverbed, of silt, of weed, of old pennies dropped by boys who became old men and then skeletons. She sits down in the mud and presses her legs into it until she feels anchored. She begins to think in sentences again. Not too fast. I am alone, she thinks, and then corrects herself, because that is not true. There are lives moving under the skin of this place, and the wind is a life, the moon is a life. The city is still behind her and everything she ever said there still rings, even if no one hears it anymore. Even the girl in her quiet nowhere has a life, though it is not the kind that moves.

Mary closes her eyes and lets the marsh decide where her weight ends and the water begins. She lies back and the reed tips meet above her, drawing a rough roof. Evening clouds slide between them in pale, dancing bands. She can smell rain but knows it won’t arrive until morning. She could sleep, but she can’t sleep. She will remain here, she decides, as if this decision belongs to her and not to what she has become. She will take from fish and from eels, and from the little warm creatures she has no names for. She’ll go into the city only when she must and mostly at dawn when those who keep late hours are already home and those who rise early are still drinking their first coffee. She’ll relearn the rhythms of this water. “Mary of the Marshes,” says a voice that sounds like her grandfather’s, pleased with how the words sit along each other. Mary of the Marshes.

She lies with her ears in water and her face toward whatever light the night will spare, and she waits for the smallest fish to grow brave. The wind brings a screech she cannot place; it might be a deer, it might be a distant door, it might be God. She doesn’t care. She only knows she is awake when she shouldn’t be, and the world she knew has gone on without her. And yet she still exists. Even in this non-life, she lives. The marsh breathes around her. The tide turns. Far away, a bell on the river speaks once and then again as if counting her into a new measure of time. Mary listens, and keeps still, and does not yet know how to die.