Neptune’s Crown

my daughter pointed at it through the green murk and said,

“Look, Daddy, Neptune’s crown.”

it was just a goddamn hubcap off a Ford Mondeo, once chrome-bright and spinning proud on some salesman’s ride, half-shiny even when the rest of the car was coughing rust. one day the clips gave up — like everything else — and it rolled down the bank, plopped into the river, and sank like a drunk into sleep.

now it sits there on the silt, five spokes sticking up like the ribs of a dead schooner. little tiddlers dart in and out of the holes, silver flashes, stupid as hopes. aluminium masts on a wreck nobody’s coming back for.

I know it’s a Mondeo because of the clips — those three bent teeth still hanging on, rusted the colour of old blood. that car was a beast once, ate motorway miles like cheap whiskey, carried me through nights between Sutton and Cambridge when we moved north and the radio played songs that tasted like happiness.

I used to run a Peugeot, a zippy little thing that pretended it was sophisticated. sold it the week the divorce papers came — needed something bigger, meaner, something that didn’t smell of her perfume. she hated that Peugeot, called it a ponce. funny, I never could stand that rolling shoebox Mini of hers, all lipstick red and lies.

the river keeps rolling, slow and brown, carrying shopping carts and condoms and cigarette butts. the hubcap just sits there crowned in weeds and sunlight, king of nothing. I lean on the rail, spit into the water, watch the ripples die.

and I still wish those tiddlers would swim up the pipes one night and eat her pampered goldfish, the whole swarm, leave the bowl empty and staring — the way she left me.

Neptune’s crown, she says;
the tiddlers come and go—
I don’t tell her no.