INCOMPLETE1
It had the sound of doom about it.
“We are going fishing with you today,” the women said.
They said it with their beads high, with an anything-you-can-do-we-can-do-better demeanour and an air reeking of suspicion and equal opportunity.
“We don’t believe your stories and we want to see what you get up to,” they said.
Why is it that this time of the year when the breeze has the tang of berley and all the merry magots mazurka in a thousand tins, do others mistrust us, seeing in this surrender to piscine pleasure some ulterior motive as murky as an incoming Port River tide?
We don’t care where it is, we’re coming with you, the women said.
No outcry came from my lips but only a sudden dimpling in a cunning smile, activated by a mind as treacherous as quicksand.
I whispered something in the ear of my fishing companion and he winked and giggled with compliance.
Bewdy, Max
The girls, as we euphemistically call them, were hopefully packing vacuum flasks, rugs and cushions and road testing collapsible chairs, little dreaming that they were to be tried beyond belief in an area combining the more stringent reaches of the equatorial Amazon with the nastier aspects of a commando course.
For we were to seek the haunt of the yellow fin whiting in the tidal streams of Middle Beach, not, mind you, from the civilised gunwales of a boat but wading down creeks that would have made Livingstone turn back and Stanley presume no more.
“We’re not going out in that swamp”, shrieked the women on our arrival at this piscatorial outpost. “We’ll stay on the beach and watch.”
I used the dreaded term weaker sex and their angry answer set the alarmed mosquitoes rising in nervous hordes.
***pumped her out and proceeded.
Then we all began baiting and casting.
The wives’ lines waved in awful doubt, hooking each other and after disentanglement they cast again downstream, bringing back a very good specimen of the younger mangrove.
I tried to comfort them with the beauties of the mangrove river, the blue crabs scything their belligerent way, the current shutting the shells while stingrays prowled, small continents of muscle, ready to carve unwary fisherfolk like a Christmas turkey.
It was the passing of a small innocuous fiddler, waving its tall like an undersea cat that sent my wife climbing a mangrove and refusing to come down.
I climbed up to soothe her, singing a little sea shanty, for I am a quick witted man liking the challenge of the moment.
Tree for two,
And too for tree
A branch for you
A twig for me
Suddenly the other female fisher made a sound reminiscent of a soprano seagull for she was in an ooze situation in the Middle Beach mire which shares the qualities of rubber glue with the soft surrender of the marshmallow.
“You wanted to come with us,” I said as I freed her with a loud crack from the elastic mud.
The other male fisher had meanwhile boxed his first yellow-fin as the tide rose and the westering sun lit the beautiful scene of mangrove and morass, of uncaring chauvinists harvesting the sea while their escorts screamed for terra firma.
My wife fell out of her tree and began drifting seawards.
“Sayonara, sister” I said, doffing my berley tin as she passed, “May Neptune be with you. May the White Pointers greet you.”
Shut up and get me ashore she said. It was a slow journey with many a slip ‘twixt the mangrove and the deep.
But the shore was at last ***
Max Fatchen