Serialisation of ‘Waiting for a Hunter’s Moon’ by Simon Smith
The back door opens just a crack, then a touch more as I try to gauge the weather. It’s nearing summer, true, but an early chill creeps across the skin, raising little millipede-print goose bumps as it goes. I hunch in a little closer around the coffee mug.
A movement. Somewhere out in the garden’s pooled murk a shadow twists and pulls itself free from the darkness around it and the cat slinks up to rub against my leg as she oozes through the door into the kitchen. Sometimes she’ll leave a little gift — a mouse; a vole — but no gift tonight. I down the last of my coffee, click off the light and give everything back to the black.
Everyone is asleep; everyone inside and, it seems, outside. It is time to leave. The front door slides closed with a shhh, the car’s engine grumps awake and I’m away.
It’s early, and yes, ideally, I’d like to be tucked up in bed right now, but this is the deal, this is how everything simply fits. I am the composite man: husband, father, teacher, angler; all roles I must fulfil and must balance in whatever way I can. For now, the role of teacher is put to one side as the half-term holiday is here, but this only places greater emphasis on everything else. There will be meals to eat, bottles of wine to share and walks to take as a husband; there will be trips to swimming pools and cinemas and parks as father, and so, before he is lost somewhere in the middle of it all, I fit the angler in wherever I can, even if that leads me along an empty stretch of motorway at three in the morning.
Other cars are few and far between. All this empty road creates a sense of a world in which the last great age of mankind has played out to a shuddering halt. Miles tick by unhindered and were it not for the voices coming through the radio, all would be silent. The scenery does little to elevate the mood, the blurred backdrop robbing the wayside of any romance, inverting Dick Walker’s famously beautiful vigil scene to leave me in a vista of grey and black and blue. Amidst such murk and regularity, it’s easier to notice the chaotic straggles of colour, even by sodium light, that are haphazardly sellotaped to the railings at various points along the motorway and the A-roads. These floral tributes are an unnatural bloom, left to wither as reminders of once-flourishing lives snuffed out too soon.
The lack of traffic sees me arrive at the shore in good time. The beachside apartment blocks all around the car park are dark, save for the insomniac glare of a few lighted windows.
Dozens and dozens of flats surround me like the cells of an abandoned hive. When alive during the day, this place can often seem insanely busy, but at night it becomes the opposite, its walls and windows offering nothing back but a muffled, dead echo as I take the spade and bucket from the boot, pull on my willies, flick on the headlamp and trudge out to the worm bed.
I’m not alone. Someone’s already here — a professional. I can tell he’s a professional bait digger by the short, blocked shadows scattered around him — buckets. Even the way he digs marks him out. All around him are the darker recesses of the curved trenches he has dug to drain away excess water as he methodically works his way through the worm bed, far more organised than my dipping in and out method of digging one worm at a time. He hasn’t noticed me as he’s too engrossed in his work, but I watch awhile, wondering about him.
Slowly, rhythmically, he moves as though locked into some bizarre repetitive dance routine — dipping, rising, turning, shuffling on; dipping, rising, turning, shuffling on. I envy him, thinking how satisfied he must be in such a life, spared the usual constraints of the nine-till-five grind, out on the shoreline in an environment he loves, getting some exercise whilst being paid to take part in an activity that has always been his lifeblood.
Quickly though, I give myself a talking-to when I realise that I’m romanticising the scene to some ridiculous level, projecting my own ideals and feelings onto someone about whom I know absolutely nothing. He’s probably knackered by having to work around these early tides for a pittance and would probably kill for some comfy desk job paying a decent wage; a job with a pension at the end of it and no half-broken back to limit his spending it. Any love he might have had for all of this was most likely sweated out years ago.
I watch him for a while, thinking about what might have led him here. Choice? Disaffection in his school days? A little beer money on the side? Again though, any attempt to understand would be all me, so I give it up. It’s not my place to know or understand action and rhythm and routine, well-practised and worked deep down into the muscles and the memory.
The set of constraints by which he lives are common to the world around him — the tides, the weather, all those things that affect his day-to-day survival are those that affect everything else that lives from the shoreline, from the birds, to the fish, to the shellfish deep in the sand upon which he walks and, although I have come to know places like this well through the years, I shall never know them, or be tied to them, half so closely as him.
With a last searching rake of his hands he plucks a final couple of worms from the beach, throws a few broken-off tails to the gulls lurking nearby then straightens up, pressing his hands into the small of his back. As he stacks and picks up his buckets, he spots me. Without missing a beat, he throws a perfunctory nod in my direction before picking up his buckets and striding off.
I suddenly realise I haven’t dug a single thing yet.
Serialisation of ‘Waiting for a Hunter’s Moon’ by Simon Smith (with permission). This book is published by and can be purchased from Cambria Books HERE
