Fishing for Something

Terry watches the tip of the float bob up and down in dark, choppy water. His feet are like stones and he flexes his knotty, purpling hands to keep them from seizing up. It’s hard to concentrate now, but there are still a couple of hours of daylight left and he will hang on until nightfall, though the chances of catching in these conditions are slim and he knows it. He is the only angler on the lake.

[private]A northeasterly wind has the leafless trees swaying to a new rhythm. No more the warm westerlies carrying the mild moist air all the way from the Caribbean, over the North Atlantic, to England’s shores. He knows about prevailing winds and the Gulf Stream because he learnt about them in his O-level geography lessons. Twenty-odd years on, this information is fresh in his mind. Same with Mann’s model of the British city. And the push and pull factors that lead to the development of shantytowns. He cannot, however, remember the date of his twin daughters’ birthday. Maybe if it coincided with a notable date in history – another O-level – like the Night of the Long Knives, or Armistice Day?

It hasn’t been much of a Christmas and freezing his nuts off at the lake in the local park is preferable to the sub-zero atmosphere at home. The wife isn’t speaking to him and neither are the twins. Well fine. It’s not as if he did it on purpose. He’s been busy at work and with the twins’ birthday falling so close to Christmas, it’s no wonder he forgot. The wife didn’t remind him either, he has noted, no doubt smugly satisfied at his failure to meet his parental obligations. Granted, he’s spent most of the festive season in the pub. But Christmas is supposed to be a time for letting your hair down, having a few drinks, getting in the party spirit. Not for the wife and her two sidekicks though. Christmas to them means more TV, more crisps, more chocolate, more biscuits, more cake. Suety deposits silting up their arteries. Dinners announced by the ping of the microwave. Terry remembers when his wife used to cook, not just heat things up. And she was a decent cook too. She used to take pride in it, poring over cookery books, trying out recipes, experimenting with ingredients. Sunday roast with all the trimmings and a bottle or two of wine, and curling up on the sofa together in front of a film; that was the routine. Having the twins changed all that. This year’s Christmas dinner came courtesy of Kwiksave.

It is the twins’ sixteenth he has forgotten. A milestone, it’s true. He should be fretting about them staying out late, disapproving of the bad company they keep, giving boyfriends the third degree. But no – fat and lazy, they sit around gorging on the saturated fats and refined sugars their mum supplies them with, like a boilerman feeding a furnace. And who pays for it all? Muggins, of course.

He looks up from his float to watch crows skipping across the litter-strewn park and is reminded of the winged monkeys from the Wizard of Oz. What were those creatures called? He must have seen the film dozens of times since he was boy. Did they even have a name? Terry’s taste for old films is something he gets from his dad. His Dad was in the thrall of the cinema in the way that only people born before TV could be, and he would fossick around the gutters every Saturday evening after the market had packed up, looking for dropped coins to fund a night at the pictures. Or at least, that’s the story he liked to tell. Over and over again. His dad’s love of films was mainly limited to those he watched from boyhood to young adulthood. East of Eden, The Third Man, White Heat, Rear Window, It’s A Wonderful Life. He was partial to a good war film too – his generation seemed to live in the perpetual shadow of World War II – A Bridge Too Far, The Eagle Has Landed, Night of the Generals, The Longest Day. And James Bond, of course.

Terry remembers his dad taking him and his sister to see Star Wars when they were both in their early teens. A huge queue outside the Cottage Road Cinema in Headingley. An intermission and little tubs of ice-cream from the lady at the front of the auditorium. Afterwards, fish and chips from Bryan’s eaten out of the paper as they sat in the car. The windows would steam up and there would be a symphony of rustling paper, crunching batter and the sucking clean of fingers. A corner of the wrapper would be found for the wiping of lips and they’d share a bottle of lemonade before his dad took the rubbish out to the bin. Windows wound down the whole journey home to get rid of the smell of chip fat and vinegar. In the hospital before he died, his dad talked about the scene at the start of the film where Darth Vader’s flagship Star Destroyer had thundered across the screen, as though in that moment he had witnessed the apotheosis of filmmaking. It was the last time Terry’s dad went to the cinema.

Terry sighs. It has got so bad at home it’s interfering with his fishing. Normally, he thinks of nothing but the fishing. Lives entirely in the moment. One hundred percent concentrated. The rod and line somehow an extension of himself. Satisfaction to be gained, not so much from the catching of fish, but the mechanics of fishing itself: the swoosh of the rod as he casts; the negligible plop of the float as it breaks the water’s surface; the click of the reel’s bale arm; the placement of rod rests for maximum comfort and convenience; the orderliness of his tackle box, a compartmentalized little universe inhabited by weights and hooks and line. But here he is, freezing by the lake, stewing over a domestic crisis and missing his long-dead dad.

Of course, the wife and the girls will say the problem lies with Terry’s drinking. Either he becomes sullen and moody, or aggressive and confrontational. Maybe so, but it never used to be like that. Before, he was a jolly, sociable drinker. Before, he would be the life and soul. Before his wife started to nag and complain the whole time, and the girls had become listless and taciturn.

The night of the twins’ forgotten birthday, no longer welcome in his own home, Terry had gone out for a drink. He hadn’t realized his next-door neighbour, effectively the wife’s sergeant-at-arms, had spotted him in flagrante delicto by the fire exit of the Red Lion. His return home was met with a hail of crockery. It was only a Christmas kiss with the landlord’s wife, for Christ’s sake. Nothing in it. Admittedly, it probably meant a good deal more to him than it did to her. He had forgotten how good it felt to be kissed; the intimacy of it. The warmth of someone else against him. The gentleness and the eagerness to please. It was almost as though it were a new sensation. Since he now makes his bed up on the sofa each night, and the landlord has barred him from the Red Lion, the sensation is destined to remain elusive.

Laboured footsteps sound behind him. Terry turns to see a man approaching, all wrapped up against the cold. Terry can do without the small talk. Always the same questions. ‘Any luck?’, ‘What bait are you on?’ Inane comments about the weather, or tales of their own fishing exploits.

Don’t they realise he wants to be left alone?

The man walks up to Terry and stands behind him. Terry stares fixedly at his float bobbing in the water. It’s bitter cold.

Minutes pass and the man says nothing. Terry can stand it no longer. He turns to the man. “Y’alright?”

The man smiles and nods. He is late middle-aged and is wearing a shabby green parka, thick ski gloves and a bobble hat pulled down around his ears. He doesn’t volunteer anything further. Terry turns back to his float.

Again, minutes pass and the man remains behind Terry, offering no conversation. Again, it is Terry who breaks the deadlock. “Bloody freezing, in’t it?”

The man in the parka grimaces, puffs out his cheeks and nods his agreement.

“You fish yourself?”

The man in the parka screws up his face and wags his head doubtfully.

“What? Used to?”

The man in the parka nods.

“What made you pack it in?”

The man in the parka gazes down at his shoes for a moment before looking up and pointing to his throat.

“What?”

The man in the parka points at his throat again, takes a breath and a rasping, wheezy noise emits from his mouth, like air being expelled from a broken pair of bellows. Terry follows the movements of the man’s lips – ‘cancer’.

“Oh, I see. Sorry to hear that, mate.”

The man in the parka nods glumly. With the breath hissing plaintively through his windpipe the man begins to explain to Terry, with much gesturing and extravagant facial contortions, how he has fished the lake since he was a boy and recounts the story of how one summer he caught a 23lb common carp using sausage meat as bait. With an old split cane rod, it had taken nearly half an hour to land.

“You can still fish though, can’t you?”

The man in the parka shakes his head emphatically.

Silence as they both turn to stare at Terry’s float. Terry feels he should say something – something about the man’s cancer – but he doesn’t know what. Both men remain mute.

A minute passes. The man in the parka leans over to touch Terry’s shoulder and deliver a rasping “Goodbye.”

“See ya,” says Terry. “Look after yourself.”

Another frozen hour with not so much as a bite. It is becoming gloomy now and festive fairy lights twinkle from the windows of the looming high-rises standing like sentries around the park. Terry decides to pack up.

Exiting the park, Terry passes a blue Ford Fiesta with rusted wheel arches parked by the roadside. Inside, the man in the parka, still wrapped up against the elements, is asleep, his head tilted back and his jaw hanging open, yellow-grey teeth fringing the dark cavity of his mouth. From within Terry hears the car stereo and the muffled voices of a radio phone-in. Perhaps he’s dead, thinks Terry, with a jolt of panic. But the man coughs in his sleep and Terry feels reassured.

A crow tumbles out of the sky, buffeted by a Siberian gust, and skips along the pavement. A winged monkey from the Land of Oz. Terry still can’t remember what they’re called. He looks at the man asleep in his car and then, with joints painful from the cold, heads for home wondering whether the Wizard of Oz has been on telly this Christmas, if he’s already missed it? He’ll ask the twins when he gets back, they’re bound to know.[/private]

GC Perry enjoys the festive season, though he doesn’t wish it were Christmas every day. He enjoys the music of Roy Wood and Wizard, but prefers The Move for everyday listening.