e Angler

by Colin Corrigan

Seanie hadn't asked for this. He was doing ne until Elaine, the boy's mother, had come and rung his doorbell a er twelve years. She told him David needs his father in his life. She said she knew it wasn't an ideal situation but she had come to terms with it now. Like she had cancer or something. Like his presence in her and her son's life was an untreatable tumour on her cervix. Now the boy sat sulking in the front of the boat, his face a rash of freckles, squinting his green eyes against the midday sun. Seanie could have been looking at himself seventeen years ago, except for the brand new Montane rain jacket and the gel shaping his ginger hair into a ridge along the top of his head. And except for the way he held his rod. Seanie had never been a hundred per cent that the kid was even his, but those freckles and that wiry hair, and the squashed nose and stick-out ears, had put that hope to bed. From the corner of his eye he saw his oat bob underwater. Here we go, Davy boy, he shouted, and he stood up in the middle of the boat and wound hard on his reel. e pike leapt out of the water on his line, ipped and writhed in the air and e boy was still sat slack-mouthed in the bow.

crashed back into the froth. Seanie kept reeling. Come on, come on, grab the net.

Keeping a hand to the side of the boat, David edged his way towards the Korum forty-two inch landing net. Seanie raised his rod and the sh spun out of the water again. She wasn't huge,

but she was a ghter. Alright, now hold it under her. at's it, you got her.

Seanie clapped his son on his back and took the net from him. He lowered the sh, still kicking and thrashing, onto the landing mat at the back of the boat and with both hands gripped her beneath her jaw and li ed her into the air. She was just over a foot and a half long, a solid two pounds. He slid his le hand under her gills, and she went still and hung limp from his ngers. Reaching into her mouth, he removed the hook. Wow. David was staring at the rows and rows of angled, jagged teeth. He was twelve years old and had never seen a pike before. Do you want to hold her? e boy shook his head de nitively from side to side. Well, do you want to take my picture, so? He nodded, found the digital camera in the tackle box and took a snap. Seanie got the camera from him and, holding the sh in the air on the right side of the frame and keeping David to the le , took another photo. boy. en he lowered the sh back into the water. What the fuck are you doing? Seanie spun his head around in surprise. e boy's green eyes were lit with rage. e pike, closer to the wide-angled lens, looked almost as big as the

What's the point in us coming all the way out here if you just throw it away? What did you expect me to do, kill her?

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Eh, duh. Well, we're not like that. We're real anglers, we sh for sport. We're not murderers. at's stupid. No, it's not. e boy crawled back into the front of the boat and stared out across the lake at the horizon, ignoring his rod.

Seanie hadn't asked for this. He and Elaine had gone to the same school in Athlone, but hardly said two words to each other during those six long years. She was one of the honours maths crowd, a studier, not ugly exactly but plain looking, one of those girls you wouldn't notice. She'd already moved up to Dublin to go to UCD, and had just come back for the weekend to go to their debs. Around ve in the morning, he went around the back of the Hodson Bay to take a piss and found her sitting on the kerb on her own next to a pool of vomit, nishing o a naggin. He went over to see if she was alright, or to see if she'd give him a swig of her Smirno , and she pulled him down on top of her. It was his rst ride, and despite the alcohol and the cold and the hardness of the tarmac it was very fast. Next thing, he heard she was pregnant and couldn't remember who had made her that way. e whole town was talking about it. He panicked and told his mother and she drove him

straight over to their house. Elaine started wailing and her da came out and boxed him in the mouth. e root canal set him back nine hundred euro.

He hadn't asked for this, but here they were, and the lake was still as a painting, and the sun was warm, and the sh were biting. He asked the boy every question he could think of, and got plenty of yesses and nos and a few one line answers: he was going into rst year of secondary school

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a er the summer, to Blackrock College. He'd got three hundred and forty euro for his con rmation. He supported Manchester City, but he preferred rugby. He'd never hurled. Seanie ran out of ideas and brought the conversation back around to shing. He talked about pike. He described how they were the sharks of fresh water, the kings of the lake, and the boy began to pay attention, even started asking questions. Seanie described how they hunted the other sh, the bream and roach and tench, by lying still in wait among the reeds, their bodies curled sideways and poised to strike like a tigress, and then they'd spring forward through the water and clamp down on their target with their powerful jaws, and eat them in one go, opening their throat like a python. And it wasn't only other sh they preyed on, but also frogs and rodents and ducklings; anything that moved, they'd eat it. ey even hunted their own kind en

that's why the younger pike stayed near the shore in the reeds, while the big ones patrolled the open water, scared of nothing. He took out the camera and showed his son a picture of two pike he'd found washed ashore, one jammed into the gullet of the other, the hunted so big it had choked the hunter. en he

showed him the thirty-seven pound monster he'd caught just over a year ago on this same stretch of lake, the third biggest pike ever hooked on Lough Ree, the proudest moment of his life. Cool, said David. e boy picked up his rod again and began skimming his crankbait along the top of the water. Seanie reached around his back and showed him how to jig the lure, letting it sink for a few seconds before reeling it back towards the surface, so it would look to the prowling pike like an injured sh. ey're evil, said David.

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Nah, it's just instinct, it's what they gotta do. We're not so di erent from them as we pretend to be. e boy squinted up at him. Seanie gripped him by the jacket. You think if I threw you overboard and held you down in the water, you wouldn't try to claw out my eyes just to save yourself ? David cackled at the thought of it. Does it not hurt them, when they bite into the hook? Seanie shook his head and rapped his knuckles against the side of the boat. eir mouths are all hard and sort of boney, no nerves, so they can chomp down on anything. Cool, said David. Seanie smiled to himself. He felt like they were forming a connection now, that the boy was beginning to get what it was to be an angler. When I was just a bit older than you are now, I nearly caught a silver pike. What's that? Seanie had surprised himself by bringing it up. A er years of slagging from his friends and the other anglers on the lake, he had stopped talking about her. Silver pike were a rare genetic mutation of the northern pike species, larger and more erce than their olive green cousins, that prowled the rivers and lakes of the States and Canada. When he was een, he'd hooked one with a

spinner from the bank, but she'd fought him and got away, taking his line and leader with her. She'd ruined his reel. But nobody else had ever seen a silver pike in Irish waters, and even those who believed him at rst had lost their faith in her long ago. ey said he'd spent too long working in

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the aluminium factory, the metal had gone to his brain. And he had worked in the factory for too long, but he could still see her, his most vivid memory, leaping clear of the water shining brilliant and sleek in the evening sunlight. Every time he went out on the lake, every strike he got, she ashed back into his mind. If she was still alive today she'd be mammoth, at least forty pounds. She's a special kind of pike, Seanie told his son. I'm the only one to have seen her. Oh yeah, said David. Grandad was saying you were always going on about that. He said that's why everyone calls you ey call me Yeah, right. Seanie bit down on his lip and looked out at the water. With all their chattering he hadn't noticed the wind pick up or the clouds gather and darken or how far they had dri ed out onto the lake. It occurred to him that they had better put on their life jackets, and at the very same moment he realised, with the sensation of his heart sinking into the acids of his stomach, that he'd le them at home. He turned his face away from the boy and cursed himself. He had made sure to bring all his best tackle a selection of rods and reels, the net and landing mat, snaps and swivels, spinners and spoons, hooks, line and sinkers but somehow the life jackets had never entered his head. All he had thought about was the sh they were going to land, him and his son, and the respect he was going to earn. He yanked the cord of the outboard motor and the little two-stroke engine roared de ance against the rising noise of the elements. It had started to rain, huge drops cutting up the surface of the heaving waves. e lake was suddenly against him. He tried to turn them back towards shore e Mentaller.

e Metaller. And that's only because of my job.

with the tiny propeller but they kept bouncing o the churning walls of water, and soon it was all

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he could do to keep the boat straight, rising and falling with the waves, hoping to wait it out.

boy was quiet now, his small arms strapping his knees to his chest, his eyes icking between Seanie and the lake around them. Seanie held out a hand towards him and called him back to the stern, but David only stared at him with those wide eyes and didn't budge. A wave washed over the lip of the boat and slapped the boy aside his head, and he cried out in high-pitched panic. Seanie, keeping as low to the oor as he could, let go of the steering sha and lunged forward to grab his son. e boat veered to the right and a wave surged underneath them and ipped them over and

the lake reached up and pulled Seanie down into her watery coldness. He kicked out with his legs and scrambled with his arms towards the rollicking surface. He coughed and breathed in a gulp of air and spray and looked around for the boy. Ducking under a wave he saw him ailing his limbs ten feet away, and he swam towards him. And then he saw her, gliding through the water at incredible speed with only the barest icks of her tail n, a full ve feet in length, incandescent in the dull murk of the lake water, a shock of silver, her aura trailing in her wake. For the rst time in his life, Seanie felt his soul erupt with religious fervour as he beheld this majesty, this angelic form, visiting him in his hour of direst need. And yet he was also gripped by a simultaneous and paralysing suspicion that she wasn't real, but a gment, a symptom of his panic or his oxygen deprivation, and typical of how he always tried to convince himself, no matter how terrible the circumstances, that everything will be okay. And then she swam right past him and opened her jaws and bit down on the boy's waist and began tossing him around in the water. Seanie pushed himself to the surface for air and then dived down towards them and grabbed at the sh's body, aimed punches at her gills, but the water worked as a force eld around her, and his sts landed weak and pathetic on her shimmering scales.

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She spun around and struck him with her tail, knocking him backwards. He kicked out as he went and caught her in the gill with the toe of his boot and she released the boy from the vice of her jaws. David oated limp in the water. No air bubbles issued from his mouth. He looked dead. Seanie grabbed his son by the arm and pulled him up to the surface. Gasping for breath, he shouted at the boy, slapped him across the face. en pain coursed up through his leg and he was

yanked back into the deep. He looked down and saw the pike's silver mouth fastened on his calf. He kicked out at her with his free leg and struck her again and again and again on the snout, and she released him and rolled away. He felt like his chest was going to explode and he surfaced once more for air, and he remembered his lleting knife. He grasped at his belt and unsheathed the knife and dived under again. He saw her trace a wide arc through the gloom, and when she came around for a renewed assault he focussed himself on her eye, which regarded him as she surged through the water not with malice, but a steely inevitability. Gripping the hilt of his knife with his st he stabbed down at her massive skull and pierced that eye with the point of his blade, and she spun around and sped away, her radiance slowly dissolving into the darkness of the lake. He oundered his way back up to the air and hooked his arm under the boy's chin, holding him a oat. gentle lull. e storm rained itself out as suddenly as it had started, and the waves settled into a e sun cut through the dissipating banks of cloud, and the boy woke up for a moment, en

his face a pale mask of confusion. A long, quiet moan pushed its way past his thin blue lips. he closed his eyes again and went silent.

Dragging his free arm through the water and kicking with his one good leg, Seanie pulled them towards the shore. e sun had almost dropped down into the water behind them when he en he heard

glimpsed the green-black treetops jutting up over the indigo surface of the lake.

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shouting and the roar of a motorboat, and they were being hauled up out of the water. last thing he remembered.

at was the

In the waiting room of the intensive care unit, Seanie sat clutching his polystyrene cup of tea. Standing in the doorway, Elaine and her mother and two doctors were discussing moving David to Beaumont Hospital in Dublin. ey just had to wait for him to stabilise. He hadn't recovered

consciousness. Elaine asked again about brain damage and the doctor told her it was still too soon to tell. en the doctors le them and the women sat down with the rest of their family. ey were

all packed into the far corner of the little room, as far away from Seanie as they could, as if he was radioactive or something. Elaine had let him know she didn't want him around, she had freaked out over the life jackets, but he wanted to be there when the boy came to. He had to stay the night at the hospital anyway, for observation. ey glared over at him and he pretended to read his paper.

Even though he had always known she existed, there was still part of him that couldn't believe he had seen her again, that she was real, bigger and ercer and more beautiful than he had ever dared imagine. He kept swimming back through his memory, the way he had kicked her, stabbed her in the eye. He knew he'd had no choice, but he felt nauseous thinking about it, and he couldn't stop asking himself: what if her scales were ripped o in the scu e, or if he'd injured her gill? What if her eye gets infected? e others who had come to see him earlier had nodded and gasped along to his story, and they'd been shocked when he showed them the size of the stitched-up wound on his leg, but he felt they didn't really believe she was silver. ey were just being nice to him today because he had

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almost died. He folded the paper and closed his eyes. He hoped the boy would wake up.

***

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