Thomas Maloney - Learning to Die

General exultation can’t help the twist of specific revulsion on his face as he pokes around in the bait bucket. Some of the squid are still half-frozen into blocks, while others — whole or in pieces — are floating loose in the grey water. Eurgh.

‘You’re getting off lightly here, old man,’ he says to Dan, whose eyes swivel from the horizon they have been surveying. He taps a reply and hits play: You always were a big girl’s blouse.

‘You’re supposed to be attracting the fish,’ Brenda teases. ‘The bait is supposed to look irresistible. Yours looks like a—’

‘Like an instrument of torture,’ supplies Natalie.

‘You need to jam that hook right through the thing’s body, and then stick the barb through the eyes like I showed you. So it’s hidden.’

‘I’ll try my method, thanks,’ replies Mike, wiping hands on his now-filthy handkerchief, taking up his rod and releasing the spool.

Again there are no bites, but as they reel in, the tip of Natalie’s rod starts to flex. They all crowd over to her side to see what creature of the deep might find itself hauled up to the light. It looks like — a very small, leopard-print shark.

‘Doggie,’ says Brenda. ‘We throw her back. Watch out — they have skin like sandpaper.’ She helps Natalie extract the hook from the poor creature, which twists and curls around her hands, weird, sleepy eyes dazzled and blinking, mouth gaping.

‘It’s bleeding.’

‘It’ll be fine. Character-building. Story to tell the grandkids.’

When Mike gets his own bite, feels the unmistakeable heft of it and begins reeling in, his mind hums with childish speculation. Alpha male catches alpha cod. Saves the day. Three cheers for Mikey. When the quarry reveals itself to be another dogfish, and a small one at that, his disbelief quickly turns to quiet, unaccountable satisfaction that he and Natalie are the two pioneers. A team.

Later, after a coffee break, and with the new baits down for just a few minutes, Brenda sweeps her rod back and begins slowly, carefully reeling. A frown of concentration that Mike remembers from long ago.

‘This is the one,’ says James, scrambling across to watch. ‘I can feel it. The White Whale.’ The first thing they see is a huge mouth, then two round, black, staring eyes.

‘May I present: dinner,’ declares Brenda. But the cod, when netted and brought aboard, is no whopper. Ron holds up his wooden rule, shakes his head and jerks a thumb towards the sea. It’s just a baby.

‘Good eating on that,’ says James wistfully, as they lean over and watch the dazed fish right itself and flop down out of sight.

‘Don’t worry,’ says Mike. ‘Plenty of time yet.’ But the morning slips by and their cavernous catch-bucket presents a mocking emptiness. Soon the favourable, sluggish waters of high tide are gone and the current drags at the lines, lifting the bait off the seabed where the elusive cod feed. Natalie keeps asking Dan if he’s had enough, and he begins to waver. Yes, soon, he taps, back aching, feet cold, maybe one last go. When the final baits are down, he taps again: Straw poll. Is it skill or is it luck?

Brenda Vickers tries her rod gently and lets out ten feet of line. As teenagers she and Austin used to dabble from Southend pier and a few other local hotspots, but she’s never fished from a boat. Her presence is a favour for Mike, and for James.

She remembers Dan, of course. When Mike explained how sick he was — that he can’t move or speak, but that mentally he’s all there — she found herself making excuses for not coming: it sounded so awkward. James talked her round, said he wanted to meet the guy again — said it might be their last chance. That’s his story. But let’s not forget the minor detail that Natalie has been bizarrely outed as James’ ex. Mike says she’s met Natalie before, but she doesn’t remember. Forgettable, perhaps. Or just one of the many mortifying nights blotted from Brenda’s memory.

Check my kibe. Check my kibe. Check my kibe.

Check my what? Dan’s eerie electronic request rings out in the silence. Brenda turns to see his rod twitching violently. Check my line. She hesitates a moment, but everyone else looks at her so she grasps the rod and lifts it from the bracket. It’s nearly wrenched out of her hands.

‘What is it, Bren?’

‘Dinner!’ says Mike. ‘Dan, you actually are the man.’

‘If you ask me,’ says Ron the skipper, with a twinkling eye, ‘I wouldn’t say that there is a cod. You might want to let out some line. Tire it out.’

The creature is swimming fast and erratically, so that one moment Brenda has to pay out line, and the next it goes slack and she reels in frantically.

‘What the hell is that thing?’

‘It’s a shark or something,’ says Natalie. ‘Can’t you let it go?’

Dan’s eyes are fixed impassively on the sea. He looks like he doesn’t give a shit, but when he glances down and taps his keypad, the message is: This is bloody brilliant . He plays it again. They laugh and cheer, even po-faced Natalie.

Suddenly the angle of the line changes. This plucky old gal’s coming up. The surface breaks fifty yards away: a flash of creamy white belly. Brenda reels hard, and her adversary thrashes air again, much closer.

‘What the fuck is it?’

‘It’s a conger. A big one.’

‘Can you eat it?’ asks James. Ron pulls a sour face.

‘Rather you lot than me.’

‘It’s all we have,’ says Mike. ‘We’ll take it.’ Ron’s eyes twinkle again.

‘Oh, “We’ll take it,” he says. If only it were that bloody simple. Can we move this gentleman back? And you, Miss — keep well back too.’ The five- or six-foot eel, thick as a man’s leg, thrashes madly in Ron’s biggest net. ‘Take that priest,’ he snaps at Mike, pointing to a short wooden club, ‘and give it two sharp goes on the noggin.’

Mike looks helplessly at James, who turns to Brenda with a pleading smile. For Christ’s sake. She makes good contact and the beast goes limp, but as they try to tip it into the crate it rears up and breaks loose, thumping around the small deck and lunging left and right. Everyone retreats, cursing. Brenda circles cautiously and, when the eel slumps for a moment, exhausted, jaws silently working, she gives it a mighty whack. Ron steps in quickly, traps the beast’s head between his boots and with a sharp, rusty, two-pronged stake severs its spinal cord.

‘Do not go gentle,’ murmurs James, in the stunned silence that follows. Dan taps his keypad.

There’s a lesson here somewhere.

James F. Saunders finds himself alone in Dan and Natalie’s living room-cum-office-cum-dining room as the mantelpiece clock — a brass thing with spinning balls — chimes seven. Dan is resting. Mike and Natalie are in charge of the cooking, but have recruited Brenda to assist in the formidable and frankly obscene task of skinning the eel.

The clock is a bourgeois anomaly in a room which, if James didn’t know the family circumstances, he would ascribe to an over-imaginative twelve-year-old boy. Mounted on the ceiling is an enormous poster print of outer space — one of those Hubble photos peppered with galaxies like snowflakes in a torch-beam. A dozen more posters on the walls: a motorcyclist leaning into a bend, knee almost touching the blurry road; a pelican gliding low over water; the earth seen from the moon; a topographic map of the Chilterns; a suspension bridge rising out of fog; the periodic table; a photograph of a blackboard covered in equations; an enlarged, incomplete Sudoku grid.

So this is where Becks has ended up. There’s not a single image that James would choose to place on his own walls (the eye candy now exhibited in place of his discarded Joyce icon: nothing), and he could never live with a chiming clock. Is this what happens to people who are dying? They revert to childhood? Dan doesn’t seem childlike in person — or childish, for that matter. More like a prophet. Perhaps it’s James’ own incapacity — his burned-out soul — that sees something juvenile here.