Lost leaves

*

Satisfaction

Nevertheless, I'm still worried. I dug him out of a hole, --  but not without a cost. Manchester Piccadilly. 74. 

And after a little pause he repeated:

No, decidedly not without a cost.

The whole time we sit here, I reflected, we do nothing but speak like short stories.

I smoothed my cheek and then picked at a little deformity. 

Do you ever come across one of those hairs that doesn't break through the top layer of skin, but goes on growing in a long thin silky coil  between the layers until eventually you find it and pull it out?

Fake query. Just want to talk about yourself.

I was prevented from continuing, but I smarted with the injustice of it. I had simply been going to remark how unretentive the roots of these hairs were, how easily they came out. And to wonder, why was that?

What was it the waves were always saying? I was old now, past my best. A surgeon turned butcher (a phrase I had just read in a music article about aged conductors). I sat on a balcony and looked at water, wrapped up in a coat. 

He rose unsteadily to his feet. His legs were a bit stiff from sitting.

All right?

I knew. I was still the child who knew though everything was wrong.

And the remarkable nutshell of a double-bass.

*

The plummet

A man went pike-fishing recently.

He stood at the end of a trembling wooden jetty and he fished in the black cap of the past, just as if there never were any hydrocarbons in Iraq etc., but nevertheless as if a very small can of oil, with the precious appearance of a spice, was permitted to a poor boat-owner out here and was mined not by Shell Gazprom or Statoil, not from the expiring ice-cubes of the global engine-rooms, not from clergy rockets of Basra and Kirkuk but only from the webbed inners of his own shed.

But you must never get oil on the spinner because the fish have a very strong sense of smell. The man drew the plummet down through the clean rag and into the misty air that rose from the lake, and the gravity of the apparatus drew it down smoothly until it broke the black surface of the water. Now the hooks weights and traces began to swim octopus lowering like a child propelling towards the bottom of the deep end. And still he could feel it falling like the octopus plastic bag in spasms, the lure through the water until the line lay among the clams and weed, the haunt of the grass-snakes. He could still feel via the tensed rod each jingle of its hooks lying in the deep lake bottom though the lake was black and everywhere the evening drew down.

Mosquitoes attacked his hat and wrists. The keys lay still on the weed for a moment, like a collapsed marionette. Then he twitched the rod-end and began a slow lazy reel to left and back. And just as the spinner began to ascend towards the trembling jetty where he stood, just then there was a single sharp and heavy blow. And a second later the lure came out of the water gleaming and dripping as if nothing in particular had happened to it.

He knew this fish. He had hoped the grandsons would catch it, but that didn't happen. Before they went home they caught a few jacks and a perch, just big enough to lay alongside the kebabs. But nothing more had been heard of the knockmeister since his own first chilly evenings on the lake.

The cottage was silent, everyone had gone back to their worlds except for them. Now in the warm swamp-dark evening he sighted the lake with his rod and his fifty years of pike-fishing. He dribbled the hinged lure along the weedpaths in the black water, patient, unhurried, interpreting the silence without emotion. The pike saw the twirling flakes of light but did not watch them. Only when it began to seem late, when the first thoughts of TV and coffee and Marika had passed by, only then. That was the time.