Gone fishing

Kick off my shoes and go outside. Grass, gravel, dirt, dust: feel them all surging and sticking between my toes. Head down to the disused canal - more picturesque than such an uninspiring location has any right to be - to find my favourite bench along the quietest stretch, just before the incline, and sit. And wait. Wait for the world to right itself again. Wait forever, if needs be.

Yes, that’s where the memories open, how they dawn. I’m sitting, hunched forward against the autumnal bite, with my hands clasped between my knees, wishing I could summon up the courage to write my name. I want to carve it for posterity into the wood that’s emerging from underneath the flaking layers of local council green, dotted like some haphazard archipelago. It’s now or never, because in twenty years I know that I’ll be just a distant speck to this place. Everything - including the two uneven footprints in the wet cement at the back of the cricket pavilion - will have been filled in by rebuilding, redevelopment, resurfacing. Rewriting the past.

If only I knew for certain that my initials were still there today, it would at least confirm to this frequently frenetic but woefully underused mind that I did exist for a moment - in that place, at that time. Canal side, early autumn, somewhere or other to the south-west.

Despite the distant recollection now becoming so much misted, swimming vagueness, this is where I frequently choose to return. This is where I allow myself to step back into a rounder, smoother skin and pause a moment. This is where the world is always sepia-coloured in a faded photograph that thankfully makes me look older than I really am, rather than today’s splattered canvas of one too many hues. This is where the child truly is father of the man - a concept I can finally grasp these many years later, even though as I sat by the almost unmoving water I rarely thought to open the copy of the collected Wordsworth I habitually stowed in my bag in readiness to appear suitably earnest and profound in front of friends.

I couldn’t help but stare intently at the lone fisherman who would sometimes take his place on the grassy bank - my grassy bank. Mine. Even in his near motionless hush, his arrival would shatter my solitude. Not that he ever caught anything, you understand. He was just there, existing, gazing off into the line of trees that bordered the open fields beyond, and hoping for his line to twitch. It never did. What a pointless waste of someone’s existence, I clearly recall thinking to myself as I cursed him under my breath. Would he want to know now how much I understand his stillness?

I can’t remember what else passed through my mind in those hours I spent escaping into myself to the accompaniment of dogs being walked, matches being played, babies being pushed. I have no doubt that I went to the bench to ponder the supposedly great thoughts that now - still only supposedly - flow from my fingers onto a keyboard, into a screen and out, out into a virtual landscape of eyes that I know, stylistic tics that I can instantly recognise, but faces that fail to ring even the most distant of bells. Scan the lines, that’s how you’ll know me; much rather that than we should ever meet in a crowded, anonymous room amidst the incessant droning, buzzing and gabbling of life unfolding.

I go fishing, that’s what I do. A book beside me that remains unopened, trees bearing down on me and obscuring a view that I have no desire to see, and the lulling rhythm of the canal lapping gently and unhurried against its banks. I cast my line into the water’s greening murk and commence my vigil, hoping for the twitching that will alert me to a promise beneath the surface. And as I hope, I also wait. I wait for the moment when the world will right itself again.

It never comes. It never did then, and it never will now. But that no longer matters, because from somewhere deep within these memories I’ve found the means, the knife, to carve my child-like jagged initials into the woodwork.