Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

The Sunday morning broke like an egg over the tired grime of the city. In a few hours the townspeople would drive to churches, golf clubs, local league football matches, and some to work. But at six a.m. it was quiet; the occasional passing of a car strange against the almost tangible somnolence of the weekly ‘morning after’

     Mr. George Holroyd rose silently, washed, and busied himself quietly as a cat about the still house. His wife, Mary, usually woke at his slightest movement to rise, but years of the regular Sunday ritual had taught her to sleep on through this particular morning.

     George was a fisherman. His work at Wardell Street branch of Barclay’s was merely his work, the means of living. Fishing was his life. With George the hobby of the millions had become a vocation. He had been secretary of the Ridley Green Fishing Club on four separate occasions, and had won the coarse angling cup at the Manchester and District finals twice. George kept no pets, and he and Mary had decided against a family, arguing, “If we can’t be sure of giving them a really good chance in life, then I don’t think we ought to bring them into the world.”

     The argument was commonplace but strong. His job at the bank was adequate to their form of living, since neither of them was subject to worldly ambitions - at least, not costly ones in any case. George’s job was regular, predictable, satisfactory. Five days a week of routine and at weekends the further routine of Saturday shopping, odd jobs, the television and occasionally the cinema, which Mary had always loved since their courting days - perhaps because of them.

     But Sunday was George’s day; his fishing day.

     “There’d be more point to it if you’d bring some of the fish back home to eat; bringing home supper like Jack Long. Dot Long said that they had trout the week before last and last week.”

     “Couldn’t have been.”

     “Well, anyway, why don’t you bring something home, love?’

     “You don’t understand, Mary; Jack Long isn’t a fisherman - not a real one. He just catches the odd fish, that’s all. He’s never done anything down at the club, you know. Never a placing. I don’t fish just to get food, love; it’s different with me and Jack Long. It’s my sport. You place them in your catch-net and let them back in after the weigh-in. I mean, Long jerks ‘em out like rabbits, clumsy-like; he’s no feeling for the sport, hasn’t got the feel of the fish.”

     “Well, I don’t understand it. What’s fish to you? Fussing over them like children.”

     “No point talking. You know tomorrow’s the third Sunday and I go to the farm. There’s no fish to come out of Mrs. Bryant’s pool anyway. For the sport, she said. Aye, real sport, too - the old ‘un. Pike. Mary’s, he’s huge with jaws like a dog, long and bright as he breaks. Five lures bloody gone, but I feel I’m going to get him one of these days. The bream and the small ‘uns - those that he leaves - they’re easy, but you wait, I’ll have the pike yet.”

     Mary murmured vague assent and turned to her washing up.

     It was the ‘old sun’ that kept George going to the farm which was a good twenty miles from Whitefield and into the eastern edge of Cheshire, south of the city. The combat between George and the pike had been going on for some five or six years, ever since he had heard of the pool from Mr. Bryant, who had done business with the Wardell Street branch some years before. He had travelled down several times and had had been briefed as to the stock of the pool by local ‘character’ Freddy Graham, a septuagenarian who stank of the tobacco of ages and who could talk the hind legs off three frogs.Since Freddy no-one had fished the pool, as the son of the farm shot and rode in his small leisure time, and the Bryants had not encouraged the local boys to cross the good arable land that lay between the farm and the village.

     The pool was again virgin, and George stole secretly to its side like a wary lover each third Sunday.

     This present Sunday had the makings of a hot day as George drove his car across the calm city, the light swirling haze over parks and churchyard promising early morning sunshine.

     The lights at Deansgate were red against him, although there was no traffic passing in the other direction.

     “Machines ordering us. I can see both ways are clear but I won’t go across. Everyone obeys. There’s not a soul in sight but we’ve all been conditioned to respond to such things; for safety. Machinery. Like bloody Pavlov’s dogs.”

     At the Bank he dealt with figures, but people too. On the riverbank or at the side of the pool he could leave both people and machines. The farm folk knew of his coming and would, seeing his familiar Morris 1000 parked in the lane, avoid the lower meadow where the pond, water coming to rest over rock, was situated. Freddy was dead, outlived by the pike, and the Bryants were shy of talk usually.

     Out of Deansgate, through the outskirts of the city as the morning grew to light and the world stirred. Another half-hour and he was nearing Byley village - eight squat council cottages, a church, no pub, an edging of farms. A newspaper bicycle boy, his news sack bulging with revelations and divorces, unsecret secrets, bringer of Sunday solace, puffing his way from town on his stretched country round; little other movement.

     The farm was quiet, too, but for the hiss and clang of the shippen, for the Bryants would be working their way towards the end of the milking. George parked and unpacked his rod and tackle. Without bothering to lock the car he set off across the meadow to the glint of water.

     The sun was now up, and its low rays wove pale yellow and brown stripes between the swaying reeds across the water as he approached. His cast slotted knowingly into the surface six yards from the distant edge of the pool ; his catch-net was attached to the bank beside beside him, and he settled to wait. His mind traced regular patterns of thought on his fishing days, and he thought now of the catch, bream, the pike perhaps; then of an incident at the Bank, an awkward client, the devastating effect that the vary. condition of Mr. Lymm the Manager’s stomach had on the even running of the branch; work sank like a lead. After the banalities of work came trains of thought of a philosophical nature, the ethical pressures behind one’s resistance to a raid on the counter, possible to contemplate simply because such an incident was patently improbable at Wardell Street; or the complexities of outwardly predictable actions, such as at the Deansgate lights that morning. Such philosophical excursions would invariably lose momentum as the wait for the first bite was prolonged, and would disappear completely when the rod first began to twitch with life.

     It came this time just before the half-hour, a bream, smallish, into the net, and two more followed in the hour.

     The sun crawled free of its curtaining haze and worked higher into the clearing sky.

     George fished on through the morning and was made aware of the passing of minutes into hours only by the regular signs of the Sunday’s moving; the air-lines from Manchester Ringway - two were visible, at gone-eleven and at one o’clock - the imperceptible rising murmur of distant noise, town movement and M.6 creeping up to the ear and revealing themselves late and near.

     One more bream and a small perch succumbed in the afternoon, which was remarkable otherwise for the approach of Bryant the farmer. The large, weathered man jovially inquired after the fishing and almost as an afterthought, a clumsy afterthought, said, “Perhaps you’d care for a cup of tea, som’at of the missus, when you’ve done? You been part of the landscape like, on Sundays, so missus thought you’d come up.”

     This, the first invitation to come from the farm, surprised George, pleasantly.

     “Well, I ... er should be getting back to town really, but well yes, I’d be glad to, for a break afterwards, thank you.”

     Bryant left, now consciously clumsy in his own fields, being watched who had no daily audience save beasts and vermin. George re-set his bait, a lure, twisted and gaudy-eyed now, and cast to the furthest end of the pool. With the turning of the reel his mind turned over pictures of the Bryants and him at tea.

     But this was not to be. Within a handful of casts the old pike was on and fighting. It had to be him for the line, a heavier line that cut the water sharply, stretched and contorted like a link to a mad puppet. The strain in his fist was a joy to the angler, and through it his brain matched the fish at turn and pull. Sky, trees and grass slid back from the sides of his head as his brain, blinkered, bore intense concentration towards the fish. His eyes caught to the quick flash of scales through the churning, broken water as the pike was highlighted silver against the green and brown of the land.

     After a period of time, which was to George beyond time, the flailing the fast sprints through weeds, these weakened, the darts and dives becoming slower, more predictable, and the drawing in of the line steadily inevitable.

     It had to come; he had known of this moment. What meaning had it now? This is the fish - simple statement. But the moment must be prolonged, the fish must serve its two purposes of sport and source of conversation. Cased and glass-eyed, a pike-stare out at the room would hold the moment of the catch. Returned to the water the fish would serve as elusive sport no longer. It must be kept.

     The weight of the basket, its lid straining, in his hand was a burden as he walked quickly back to the car. But as he walked pride flowed from the weight, besides ‘catch was no theft’. He would tell Mary of the fight, lay the weight of the wet, bright fish before her. He would re-tell of the catch over the early morning accounting. He would ….. but the full, ambling shape of Bryant crossed before him, approaching the gate. “Had a good day? Be ready for that cup I bet.”

     He couldn’t. The basket seemed to pull at his arm, the pike fiercer dead than alive. The farmer must surely see the fish, his, Bryant’s fish. “I ... er .… well really I had better be home to my wife ... er ... later than I thought really,” he mumbled, then some form of thanks to the farmer for his wife, “very kind of ...” and hurriedly packed his tackle into the Minor. Bryant’s embarrassment slid into confusion as the car ran crazily back along the pocked lane.

     That was it. The pool was gone from him, dried from his vision, he could never fish there again. Bryant would know, would surely know without need of thought. The farm would know, wife and hands; children would hear.

     And the fish. ‘Caught 14th May 1970 by G. Holroyd at Byley’.

     No. It couldn’t be that. The fish could never hang as trophy; not honestly.

     Two newspapers did it. The bundle sank anonymously into the lay-by bin beneath the trash of picnics.

     George was quieter than usual upon his return. Mary sensed that this was not the quiet of satisfaction and left him to his brooding. It was he who finally broke the silence.

     “I’ll stop going to the pool at the farm, I think. It’s too far, Mary. I’ll fish the river instead.”

     “Oh?” she inquired, with amused half-interest. “But I thought you were after that big pike that you go on about. Your ‘old rival’ you said. Are you going to let him at peace, poor creature, in his pool now after all these Sundays? And has a fish finally beaten you, George Holroyd?”

     The words followed him out of the back door without answer as he walked down the path to the creosoted shed at the bottom. He entered, rod-case and basket in his hand; and the click of the latch, for all its futility against intruder, sounded with a firm finality above the laughing games of the children in the back lane.