The Fisherman Fugues

The Fisherman Fugues

Fugue 1

I think the old people still walk along the shoreline here, listening to the gentle lap lap of the wavelets formed by the incoming tide on the sandy, muddy flats. The little crabs scurry across the wet ground with a strange clicking sound, burying themselves in holes before they’re seen in the dark black eyes of the killing birds. I laughed when a woman I knew, a long time ago, said that to live by the sea would be so life affirming and another woman, whose people had lived here for what amounted to forever, said that this was the place the old people came to heal. To me, this place was formed and continues to live in the shadow of death.

There was a time when this was different, when I didn’t think about such things.

My father and his friends have easy laughs. At seven years old, sitting in the front of the little aluminium dinghy I never understood their jokes and the joke is that now that I would understand the jokes, I no longer remember them. So many things are disappearing from the realm of memory and those other things, those things I prefer not to remember, I encounter in dreams.

It is not so far from the small regional city that I once called home that I couldn’t choose to return whenever I liked, to catch up with friends, to listen to the gossip that never interested me anyway, to listen to all the petty jealousies – did you see his poem in Meanjin somebody would ask and the look on everybody’s face was the same – that they were the ones who deserved to be published. When one of my friends won a big prize for his words, the words of his friends were prizeless. My little joke. The words of his friends were not well meaning, their congratulations shallow. I choose not to go back to the regional city I called home.

She would be there, of course. Easy to find in whatever café was determined to be de rigueur by the scribbling classes of the town.

She would be wearing her peasant rig – the clothes she had bought from the Mapuche in Chile, the jewellery from the Apache in Santa Fe, the wooden clogs found in a second-hand shop in Durham with the coal dust ground into the cracks in the wood and the beret picked up somewhere in the Pyrenees. Her friends would be discussing literary prizes, often denouncing the winners and judges and using words like tokenism and post-colonialist and paradigm and trope and they would all be nodding wisely as they sip their fair-trade coffee with almond milk or soy milk or oat milk or hemp milk and munch on their gluten free linseed bread with nut butter and avocado.

She used to love eggs benedict with ham and a large bol of café au lait that we would have on a Sunday morning in a little café in our suburb, trying to recreate the breakfasts we had eaten that glorious Autumn in Montmartre when I still had words, still had something to say.

Fugue 2

Dawn. The sun appears before the two headlands, that stand like stone faced guards at the entrance to the port. She comes to sit every morning on a rocky ledge on a narrow point that splits the point in half, a short climb down from the street and the houses and the cars and the children and the failing marriages and the illnesses and diseases of the elderly and the barely disguised anger of men and the well disguised pain of women.

She is without anger, illness or pain and has no children.

She rubs her hands on the indentations on the rock floor – her friend Sally told her that her grandmother had told her that, in the old days, before the settlers came with their men in chains, horses and guns, these holes in the stone ground were used as ovens to cook the oysters. Sally has sad eyes and speaks of the old days with sorrow in her voice.

The woman, Sally’s friend, knows the rituals of a man who would, that morning, be walking on the mud flats further upstream and on the opposite bank and how, he too, would be staring at the sun.

She remembers the cities of the world, learning the Tango in La Boca one steamy summer in Buenos Aries, him with his cream-coloured Panama hat, Studio 54 in Mid-Town Manhattan with his Fedora at a rakish angle, Ronny Scott’s in London where he wore a beret and smoked Gitanes and Berlin.

 She tries not to remember waking in a London to a note and a grey rainy day and an emptiness inside.

Fugue 3

He is an old man, but I imagine that was not always the case. What I mean is, that of course, I know that he was not an old man always and that, yes, he would have been a young man once, even younger than me and while I am not a child, I am still young; young enough to be the old man’s son but not so young to be his grandson. I think I am trying to say is that it is hard to imagine him as young man doing the things that young men do. It is hard to imagine him with energy, hard to imagine him without a shock of white hair, hard to imagine him without a lined face or stooped shoulders as he walks each morning from his little cottage by the water, along the shoreline to the little bay, half a kilometre away and then back again only to emerge from his place just before dusk and to do it again. I watch him as I tend to my work, preparing the oyster racks, painting them with tar, fixing the wire and staking them ready for the next growing. 

He comes to the pub, once a week on a Friday night. He gets a lift in with from Stinky Jarvis and then either gets a ride home from me or Dad or walks back home the five miles, three of them along the old highway that’s quiet since they built the by-pass and the last two along the dirt road that sees no traffic late at night.

Like all old men, he talks little of the future a lot of the past and a bit about the present as if he has done all the living that he intends to do and that it is now just a day-by-day proposition. You would think, to listen to him, that he was ancient, but I think he is not much older than my own father who turned sixty last Christmas.

He just sort of turned up a year back and the shack that he lived in had been empty for a couple of years and before that it had been a sort of weekend fishing hut for some family or another that Dad knew. My Kiwi mate, Barry, calls the place a ‘bach’ which I think might be because they were once inhabited by bachelors, because it’s pronounced the same as ‘batch’. The man said that the place had belonged to his father and that he used to come here as a little boy.

The way he walked up and down the mudflats when the tide was out, made him look like he was looking for something, like some big ungainly wading bird hoping to get a big fat sand worm. He would walk slowly, his head down and his hands behind his back. I don’t think he was looking for something physical and perhaps the only thing he had really lost was himself.

Fugue 4

The woman comes most days to remember or forget – she no longer knows why and cares even less, her walk to the rock shelf now being more habit than anything else.

She could not decide if she liked bright clear mornings better than dark, broody and stormy afternoons. She thought the poet, over the other side on the mud flats probably preferred the stormy afternoons and evenings – the roll and crack of thunder, the illuminating micro-second flash of lightning that is quickly swallowed back up by the darkness.

Her friend said that the man was a ‘poet mordant’.  She wanted to know why every time she wanted to talk about herself, her friend turned the conversation to be about him. He was the past.

Yet, here she was, by the same blue water, deliberate – separated by the bay but when she put her feet in the water, it was the same blue water that he put his feet in.

Of all the people she knew, the man was the only one not to have a presence in the digital world, not to have created a cyber persona, one that was heavily curated to the point of being about a person who was almost mythical, which was how she described most of her friends and their presence on social media anyway.

She used to post lots of things on her various social media accounts – things that she thought were witty and insightful, sometimes whimsical and sometimes angry at the injustices of the world, the dispossessed peoples or the ravages of climate change and all the other causes that they both believed in, the flags and banners that they bore, the battles they shared when they both believed in things, when they both had causes and she would become angry thinking of the way he retreated into a world of silence and how nobody had seen him for months and months when he first disappeared and how it was her brother-in-law who went on a fishing trip with his mate and were planning to put their tinny in at the boat ramp in the town near where the man lived and how her brother-in-law had spoken to the man at the little general store when the brother-in-law stopped for bait and how the man said that he was living nearby but was a bit vague about where nearby was other than it was very near the water and that the man enjoyed walking on the mudflats at low tide.

These days she posted rarely on social media and, when she did, it was of spectacular sunrises or sunsets taken from her rock perch.

Fugue 5

We became mates at university – he was wild and impetuous and curious about everything and talked at one hundred miles per hour mainly about music and poetry, but also about art and theatre and politics and history. He was extremely well read even at nineteen and said that in high school he barely passed English because he spent the year reading Proust and Joyce and not the texts on the proscribed list and said that he thought he got by with a pass because he threw in a lot of references to other books that he suspected the markers hadn’t read and so couldn’t risk failing him but also couldn’t risk giving him a high mark.

He really wanted a girlfriend but pretended that he wasn’t interested in commitment. 

He loved that song by The Triffids, the last track on Born Sandy Devotional, the one sung by Jill Birt, where she sings about the man who has been so hurt that there is nothing left to please or excite him, and I wonder if that’s how my friend ended up.

He started honours and dropped out and I started a Dip Ed and finished it and then spent the next forty years teaching, settling down with Alison, who I started dating in second year of uni and having children and all that other stuff that you do in the suburbs – worry about your mortgage, tend your garden and have the neighbours over for a barbecue on grand final night.

He ran around town. He was dangerous. Alison said he was like an open razor that somebody was likely to cut themselves on and I think she had heard that expression in one of the plays that she acted in when we were both undergraduates.

Somebody told me once that they saw him at a party, taking great swigs of Bushmills straight out of the bottle and then leaping on top of the kitchen table where he started to recite poetry. He must have been in his early thirties and was too old to be reciting poetry at parties.

He’d found somebody by then, ‘Double Trouble’ people called them. They were both drinkers. They were both poets.

She was beautiful.

She had inherited a bit of money, so somebody said.

They travelled a lot, living off her money, reading their poems in dingy little venues all over the world.

He never once called me.

Fugue 6

I fell in love with Laugharne. There were ghosts there, for sure. I visited it alone, a day trip after a conference at Cardiff. She stayed in London, jealous perhaps that she hadn’t been invited to talk at the conference. She was the better poet of the two of us. 

I fell in love with Laugharne. The birds on the estuary in the early morning – low tide, I expected women picking winkles, winkle pickers and I thought of the shoes I wore in the eighties.

I fell in love with Laugharne and wanted to live forever, on my own, by the water. Waking and sleeping with the tides, a lunatic in lunar synchronicity.

I fell in love with Laugharne and the person I knew changed forever – deaths and entrances on the muddy steps leading away from the River Táf.

I flew home on my own and left her in London with a note saying, ‘thank you for the ride, it was fun while it lasted’.

Falling in love with Laugharne I thought of my own dead father and the place he loved and I remembered fishermen.