Mr Crabtree was alone in his study, squinting at his latest creation through the magnifying lens of his jeweller’s monocle. The Greenwell’s Glory was looking decidedly off centre and utterly ridiculous on its size 6, long shank carp hook, but the Christmas brandy had taken its toll, and anything smaller was now clearly out of the question. Stacked beside him were a heap of his earlier efforts. Somewhere at the bottom was a neat and flawless Coch-y-bondu tied some three hours earlier, but recent additions more closely resembled the earthly remains of kamikaze moths, self sacrificed to the candle flame, then spiralled scorched and lifeless onto the leather covered surface of the bureau.
The master of the house was still in a temper after being out voted over the choice of Christmas film on the telly. He had been rather looking forward to the re-run of Zulu Dawn, but irritated by losing out to the popular, family choice of The Spy Who Shagged Me, had retreated to his bolthole with only a bottle of Courvoisier and his own irascible temper for company. Glaring up at the walls of the study, the glass-cased pike seemed to be grinning at him, whilst the bamboo handled gaff hook, with its cork covered point, seemed to be inviting a bout of bloody retribution. The loud cackles of wife and son penetrated his haven and peppered the air like gunfire. How he hated this time of year, with its enforced jollity and rampant commercialism. He felt trapped in an era far ahead of his natural time, which moved at a speed beyond his comprehension and with values that were alien to him. He upended his pipe over the bin, clearing the bowl of the cherry flavoured, Christmas present pipe tobacco, and re-stocked it with a particularly vicious and evil smelling rough shag. Then, with pipe in one hand and brandy balloon in the other, he drifted off into a reverie of sweet smelling meadows and babbling streams, where fat trout launched themselves from crystal waters, waxing fat on the rising, falling and twisting, myriad clouds of mayflies.
Crabtree woke with a start. Adjacent to his brandy soaked groin, the trouser leg was still smouldering, as ancient tweed combined noxiously with hair and flesh. The pain had surely saved him from far worse a fate. The house seemed strangely quiet, that is until the muffled chime of the wall clock signalled the arrival of 5am on Boxing Day morning. Still bleary-eyed and dull of thought, he remembered the promise to take his son pike fishing as a traditional Yuletide treat. With throbbing head and jelly legs, he waded through the darkened corridors to face the challenge of sneaking un-noticed for a few hours of blissful insensibility beside his recumbent wife.
It seemed as if his head had only just hit the pillow when Peter banged upon the bedroom door. “Dad, are you dressed yet? It’s nearly light”. “Vicious little bastard”, thought the hung over Crabtree. “Any other time and he’d be inventing all kinds of excuses to get out of it”. Slowly and groggily, he rolled from the duvet to the bedroom floor: his many years with BT as a customer relations manager had beaten any potential resistance into submission. So, with brain on automatic pilot, and pungent Damart obediently self-rolling over the lumpen terrain of his wobbling flesh, a grumpy and unwashed Crabtree found himself inelegantly sprawled on a kitchen chair, as Peter dutifully plied him with strong coffee and runny, fried egg sandwiches.
“Where are you taking me dad?” said Peter, obviously hoping that his Christmas treat involved a surprise visit to a highly exclusive estate lake, where snaggle-toothed, wide jawed pike would launch themselves recklessly at every lure he cast upon the pristine waters.
Crabtree stifled a belch, and fought back the waves of nausea that followed the taste of eggy phlegm at the back of his throat. Distaste turned to utter misery as his pinprick pupils set in pools of raw liver, swivelled in the sockets, casting their gaze upon the wet and bloody parcel of sprats that Peter was examining on the draining board. Those little gaping mouths, the sightless, bloodshot eyes, the fishy stench of death; each one a giddy echo of his own protracted torment, only serving to deepen his despair.
Crabtree had originally pencilled in The Boxing Day treat as an expedition in search of the legendary duck-eating monsters of Sir Hugh Gascoyne’s private decoy, but this little plan had been ruined after he had been ignominiously blackballed, and barred from the Conservative Club for cheating at cards. In a panic, he had rescued the day by procuring tickets for a club lake in the neighbouring county, where pike fishing was allowed on condition that any fish caught were killed immediately. As a precaution, he had booked under a false name in case the blacklist extended beyond the immediate locality, but quite reasonably assumed that in any case, on the day after Christmas, the bailiff would be far too occupied in the pursuit of unconsciousness to perform his tiresome duty of checking credentials. Peter dutifully loaded the car, while his father stumbled groggily on his third excursion to another noisy interlude in the toilet.
Peering slit-eyed over the steering wheel, Crabtree manoeuvred his vehicle through the early morning gloom as the roads glistened in the beam from the headlights. Suicidal rabbits narrowly escaped a bloody demise on the frosty verges as Peter glanced anxiously at the shambolic, mad eyed, caffeine charged figure beside him. “Father”, he said, “are their truly thirty pounders in this lake where we are going?”
“Trust me Peter”, he replied, “There are pike in this lake over a hundred years old. They spend most of the time unreachable, at the bottom of a sixty-foot deep hole, and divers who have seen them have shot back up to the surface numb with terror, and spent a week in hospital recovering from the bends. Reliable witnesses have seen them drag fully-grown Alsatians under the water, and a canoeist once had his paddle bitten in half”
Peter glanced back at the hunched, demented figure of his father; his eggy chin and tousled hair protruding in greasy spikes from under his cap, and wondered how he could find out if he had actually been adopted, rather than being the product of his father’s loins, and doomed to inevitable madness.
They turned into the car park as the grey light of dawn cast its misery upon the chilled air. Not surprisingly, they found themselves alone. Next to the car, a bin made from a rusting oil drum had overflowed its contents onto the floor. Cans and bottles were strewn around, and the air crackled with static from the overhead power lines. It was not the image that Peter had been conjuring up in his mind. He unloaded the car with the resigned air of someone whose past experiences have taught him to expect such disappointments. Father emptied his bladder, aiming at the empty cans, rolling them over the concrete.
After negotiating the drooping wires supporting the broken concrete fence posts, and crunching along the littered pathway through the bushes, the lake itself was a bit of a pleasant surprise. Admittedly, the bent and broken garden chair did little to add to the atmosphere, but the occasional reed beds held promise, and the air was tinged with expectancy, though with the added piquant tang of dog dirt.
As they walked along the bank, looking for the most suitable vantage point, the collapsed skulls of long-dead pike stared up at them at regular intervals, arranged amidst decaying piles of yellow skin and scattered bones and scales. Sadly, Crabtree remembered the pact he’d rashly made in order to fulfil his promise to his son. As they reached a corner bay, the still fresh corpse of a double figure pike bobbed gently where the ripples lapped the reeds. Protruding from its throat were several feet of thick and wiry nylon. “There you are Peter, I told you there were some good pike in here”, said Crabtree, without even the slightest hint of irony.
Trying to overcome the mortuary atmosphere, Peter began at once to tackle up pop-up sprat deadbait rod for his father, and for himself, a vained drifter, with which he would attempt to drift a sprat along the reedy perimeter of the bay. Hearing the nearby patter of urine on the hard bank, Peter cast the pop-up out into the pit, ensuring that there was little danger of it interfering with his more serious activities. Crabtree turned around, eerily surrounded by an acrid cloud of stem, then passively sat down after struggling with his trouser buttons. He watched with envy as Peter’s sprat was launched to within a foot of the gap where the bay opened out into the lake. The line fed through the sliding float’s ring as the sprat fluttered down into the water, eventually halted by the stop knot, a foot from the bed of the lake. The light breeze caught the orange vain, and the float was soon bobbing on its semi-circular trajectory. It had only travelled three or four yards, when the reeds were heard to rustle, then visibly parted as an unseen fish launched itself from its hiding place. The float disappeared in an oily swirl and the line began to tighten. Peter waited as it tightened to the rod tip, then lifting the rod in a smooth, controlled action he bent the rod into the fish, and the pike was on. Crabtree watched in amazement. He hadn’t taught him to do it like that.
It soon became apparent that Peter was in contact with a very good fish. The powerful carbon retained its acute hoop as the pike, deep down, began a slow tour of the bay. Through his throbbing headache, Crabtree started to wonder if the stories were actually true, and was beginning to have hallucinations of the pike’s great maw coughing up ducks’ feet, dog collars, cloth caps and Wellingtons. The clutch ticked slowly as Peter applied a steady pressure. There was a brief glimpse of a long flank as the fish turned near the surface, creating a huge boil, and sending gentle waves rolling back to the water’s edge. Several times, the clutch screamed more urgently as the fish made an effort to reach the open water, but each time it was turned back well short of its target.
Closer and closer it came to the waiting net, and after one final surge it rolled on the top and was drawn into the mesh. Crabtree gawped in amazement, but couldn’t help but feel a fatherly pride at the way in which his son had handled the fight. As Peter struggled back from the water under the weight of the fish, he ran up to him and grabbed the mesh, and together, they lifted the pike to the safety of the bank. As they lowered the wet net onto the mat, Crabtree held down the mesh to prevent the fish from kicking, while Peter pulled the great mouth open to extract the two trebles. With the fish held aloft in the mat, the scales registered a combined weight of twenty-five and a half pounds, but then suddenly, they were aware of a figure walking towards them from the car park. “ Oh God, it’s the bloody bailiff”, said Crabtree, “Get it back into the water quickly”. The great fish slid off the mat and righted itself in the margins. With a couple of flicks of its fins it gradually orientated itself, then slowly and gradually moved back towards the depths. With a final kick of the tail it vanished from view, leaving a vortex in the water that was fading away as the bailiff approached.
“Good work lads, that’s another one of the evil bastards out of the way then. Didn’t think anybody would bother to turn up today, I just came for a walk to clear my head”.
Slightly puzzled at first, it gradually dawned on them that his gaze was directed towards the dead fish in the rushes. Deciding that discretion was the better part of valour, they put aside their principles and concurred. As the bailiff went on his way, they turned towards each other and started to laugh, bonded by their partnership in subterfuge.
“Dad, you’ve got a run”, said Peter, and a suddenly revived and enthusiastic Crabtree dashed towards his rod, desperately trying to remember the procedure his son had taught him with his previous fish.
If anyone has some suitable Crabtree-type illustrations that they would allow me to use (legally), then please contact me.