Doreen

You want to know about Terry. Everyone wants to know about Terry now he's gone. Funny, that. When he was here, filling the doorway, filling the chair, filling the whole bloody house with his presence, nobody asked a thing. Not a single question. Now he's a hole in the world and everyone's poking at the edges.

He was my husband for twenty-three years. That's what I keep coming back to. Twenty-three years of listening to his boots on the stairs, of knowing which creak meant he was in a mood and which meant he'd stopped for a pint on the way home. Twenty-three years of ironing his work shirts and never once telling him I hated the smell of the dock grease that wouldn't wash out. You learn to live with things. That's what marriage is. Learning.

He wasn't a bad man. I want that clear. He could be kind. When our Maureen was little and had the croup, he sat up three nights straight with her on his chest, her small body wrapped in a blanket, humming tunes he'd learned off his own father. Tunes from before the war. He had a voice like gravel but he used it soft.

But there was another Terry. The Terry who came home after the Royal Docks put him on half-time, then no-time. The Terry who sat at the kitchen table with the Racing Post and a bottle of Bell's, staring at the form guide like it held the answer to everything. The Terry who started going to Frank Tully's pub on the Isle of Dogs, the one with no name over the door, where the men who still had cash went to drink it and the men who didn't went to borrow.

I knew about the money. Of course I knew. I found the book in his coat pocket, a little black one with figures in pencil. Five pounds here, ten there. Interest accumulating in a column he never showed me. I asked him once, just once, and he looked at me with such shame I never asked again.

That's the thing about being married to a man like Terry. You hold all the versions of him in your head at once. The father. The husband. The man who cried at his mother's funeral and the man who put his fist through the bathroom door. They're all Terry and none of them is the whole Terry. I don't know if I ever met the whole Terry. Maybe nobody did.

The last time I saw him he was standing at the back door, looking out at the tiny garden, the one he never got around to fixing. He had his good coat on. He said he was going for a walk. He said he needed to clear his head.

He never came back.

The police asked if he'd seemed different. Different how? He was always different. He was a different man depending on the hour, the day, the amount in his pocket. That's what I tried to tell them. Terry wasn't one thing. He was a thousand things, and I was only ever allowed to see some of them.

Billy

I worked the Royal Docks with Terry Mack for fifteen years. Fifteen years of loading timber, unloading grain, hauling cargo that came from places I couldn't even pronounce. We were mates, proper mates. The kind who know each other's rhythm without speaking.

The docks were a world then, you understand. A whole city inside a city. The cranes, the ships, the smell of the Thames at low tide. The way the light fell through the warehouse windows in the afternoon, all gold and dust. Terry knew that world better than anyone. He could read a ship's manifest like other men read a newspaper. He knew the weight of a cargo just by looking at it.

When they started closing the docks, it was like watching a death happen in slow motion. The Surrey Docks went first. Then the East India. Each closure was a piece of the world pulled away. By 1985, the Royal Docks were barely breathing. We'd go in for a shift and stand around for hours because there was nothing to unload. Ships had stopped coming. They went to Tilbury instead, or to Felixstowe, where the container ports were. The old docks couldn't handle the containers. Too shallow. Too narrow. Too old.

Thatcher called it modernisation. She called it progress. She'd never spent a day on the docks. She'd never watched a man's hands go still because there was nothing left for them to hold.

Terry took it hard. Harder than most. Some men found other work, building sites, driving vans. But Terry was a docker. It was in his blood. His father had worked the docks. His grandfather before him. The Mack family had been unloading ships on the Thames since before the Royal Docks were even built. When the work stopped, something in Terry stopped too.

He started going to a different kind of pub. A place in Poplar where the men who still had money from the redundancy packages went to lose it. I went with him once. Once was enough. There was a back room with a table and men who didn't smile. Frank Tully ran the place. Frank Tully ran a lot of things in the East End. Loans. Favours. Debts that grew in the dark.

I told Terry to stay away from it. He laughed. He said it was nothing, just a bit of fun, a way to pass the time. But I saw the way he looked over his shoulder when we walked down Barking Road. I saw the bruise on his ribs one time, the one he said came from a fall.

The Terry I knew was loyal. He'd give you his last fiver if you needed it. He'd stand with you in a fight. But the Terry who got tangled with Frank Tully's crew wasn't the same man. It was like the docks closure had created a hole in him, and something else had crawled in to fill the space.

When they pulled his coat out of the Thames, down by the old King George V Dock, I couldn't believe it. Not Terry. He knew that water too well. He'd grown up swimming in it. He knew the currents, the tides, where the river turned dangerous. He wouldn't have fallen in by accident.

But maybe that's the point. Maybe the man who knew the river wasn't the man who walked to the edge that night. Maybe by then, there were too many Terrys, and the one who could swim had already drowned.

Naz

I am not supposed to speak ill of the dead. This is what my mother taught me, and she is a woman who knows. But I will tell you what I saw, and you can make of it what you will.

My shop is on Chrisp Street, just off the market. I opened it in 1983, after I came to London from Sylhet. It is a small shop, convenience, open late. I sell milk, bread, cigarettes, tins of beans. The usual. In 1985, not everyone was happy to see a Bengali running a shop in the East End. There were words shouted from cars. Sometimes worse.

Terry Mack was one of the ones who did not shout. I remember the first time he came in. He needed cigarettes, Embassy Regal, and his hands were shaking. He looked at me and he looked at the shop and I saw him decide something. He put his money on the counter and he said, All right, son? and that was it. No trouble. Just a man buying cigarettes.

After that, he came in regular. Sometimes two, three times a week. He always bought the same thing. He never caused any trouble. But there were nights when he stayed longer than he needed to. He would stand by the window, looking out at the street, and I would pretend to be busy with the stock.

One night, maybe three months ago, he came in and his face was different. Not angry. Something else. He stood at the counter and he said, You ever think about going back?

I said, Back where?

He said, Home. Wherever home is.

I told him that England was my home now. That I had a shop, a flat above it, a future. He nodded and he looked at the street again and he said, Good for you. Good for you, son. You hold onto that.

Then he left. And I never saw him again.

The police came to my shop afterward. They asked if I knew him. I said I knew him as a customer. They asked if he had ever said anything about wanting to harm himself. I said no. They asked if he had enemies. I thought about the men who shouted from cars, the ones who threw a brick through my window in 1984. But those weren't Terry's enemies. Those were mine.

Here is what I know about Terry Mack. He was a man who came into my shop and treated me like a human being. In this neighbourhood, in that year, that was not nothing. That was something. That was everything.

I do not know if he was a good husband or a good father or a good man in the ways that matter. I only know that to me, in my shop, on my street, he was decent. And maybe that version is as true as any other.

Maureen

My dad was a quiet man. That's how I remember him. Not the shouting, not the drinking, not the door he put his fist through. I remember him quiet.

When I was little, he used to take me to the Tower of London on the tube. Just us. He'd point at the ravens and tell me stories about them, stories he made up, about how they'd once been kings who got turned into birds. I believed him. I believed everything he said.

He wasn't educated. He left school at fourteen. But he knew things. He knew how to fix a bicycle chain. He knew the names of all the ships that had ever docked at the Royal Docks. He knew which mushrooms you could pick on Hackney Marshes and which would kill you. He had a kind of knowledge that didn't come from books.

When the docks closed, something went out of him. It was like watching a light dim. He stopped telling stories. He stopped taking me anywhere. He stayed in his chair, the one by the window, and he looked out at the street like he was waiting for something that wasn't coming.

I found the book. The black one. After he disappeared. I was helping Mum clear out his things because she couldn't do it herself. It was in the pocket of his coat, the one that didn't go in the river with him. The one that stayed in the wardrobe.

I read it. All of it. The figures. The names. Frank Tully's name, written over and over. And at the back, in my dad's bad handwriting, a list. Dates. Times. Amounts paid. He was paying it back, bit by bit. He was trying.

The last entry was from the week he disappeared. It said: Final. And then it said: Fuck them.

I don't know what that meant. Maybe he'd paid it all off. Maybe he'd decided he couldn't pay anymore. Maybe it meant something else entirely.

The police called it a suicide. They said the river, the coat found floating, the state of mind. But they don't tell you about the quiet. They don't tell you about the man who could sit in a room without moving for three hours, his hands empty, his eyes on the window. They don't tell you about the stories he used to tell, the ones about ravens that used to be kings.

There are a hundred versions of my father. I only got to see a few of them. I think he knew that. I think it broke his heart.

Frank

I'm not in the business of explaining myself. But I'll tell you this much. Terry Mack owed me money. A lot of money. And he knew the terms.

He came to me in 1984, after the Royal Docks gave him his cards. He needed cash. His wife needed the housekeeping. His daughter needed school shoes. I gave it to him. Simple as that. I'm a businessman. I provide a service.

The interest was what we agreed. He knew the numbers. He signed his name. Nobody forced him. Nobody put a gun to his head. He came to my pub, he sat in my back room, he took my money. That's the deal.

Did I send the boys round? Course I did. That's how it works. You don't pay, you get a reminder. A broken window. A word in your ear. Nothing permanent. Nothing he couldn't handle. Terry was a tough bloke. He'd been a docker. He'd handled worse.

The bruise on his ribs? That was from a fall. I know because my boys told me he said it was from a fall. And if a man says it's from a fall, it's from a fall. I'm not responsible for what a man does to himself.

Here's something they won't tell you. The week before he disappeared, Terry came to see me. Paid off the whole lot. Every penny. With interest. He put the cash on my desk, all in twenties, and he said, We're square.

I said, We're square.

He looked at me for a long moment. Not angry. Not afraid. Something else. Something I couldn't read.

Then he left.

I don't know what happened to him after that. I don't know if he jumped or fell or just walked away and started over. I don't know if he's dead or alive. But I know he paid his debt. I know he squared it. And I know that whatever he did with himself afterward, that was his choice, not mine.

People like to point fingers. They like to say Frank Tully broke him, Frank Tully pushed him, Frank Tully drove him to the river. But Terry Mack was broken long before he came to me. The docks broke him. The city broke him. The world broke him. I was just the last man he owed money to.

And in the end, he didn't even owe me that.

After

The Thames keeps moving. It doesn't care about Terry Mack. It flows past the old docks, past the new developments going up on the Isle of Dogs, past the empty warehouses and the cranes that don't move anymore. It washes over everything. The water remembers nothing.

But the people remember. Doreen remembers a husband. Billy remembers a mate. Naz remembers a customer who was decent. Maureen remembers a father who told stories. Frank remembers a debtor who paid.

Five versions of one man. Five portraits, none of them matching, none of them wrong. Terry Mack was all of these things and none of them. He existed only in the space between the people who knew him, in the network of connections that held him together. When that network broke, he scattered into fragments, each one carried away by someone who thought they understood.

Maybe that's all any of us are. A collection of other people's versions, held together by nothing more than the fact that enough people agree to call us by the same name.

The river doesn't answer. It never does.