Something Fishy

by Derek Hansen

  Lambert and Millie didn’t get divorced or formally separate or do any of the usual things people do when they go their own way. Millie simply said that after forty years of marriage, all of which they’d spent in the same three-bedroom weatherboard house, she deserved some time to herself. She must have felt the need pretty keenly because it transpired that her idea of time to herself went far beyond most people’s; what Millie had decided to do was take off to the other side of the world and walk the ancient Celtic trails of Great Britain and Ireland. Not only walk them, but walk them alone.

  When Millie told Lambert her plans, he was initially stunned, though stunned is an inadequate description. He wasn’t just lost for words, his whole thinking process stalled in a monumental seizure of his synapses. It wasn’t the plans so much as the fact that they were Millie’s. Millie’s! Millie, his quiet, uncomplaining wife and mother to his two grown-up and married children. Millie, his constant companion — except when he was working or fishing, which was far more often than was good for any relationship. Nothing in her entire life had even hinted at her intentions. When Lambert realised how serious she was and the degree to which she’d thought things through, his chest swelled with pride and he offered her all the support he could.

  ‘I didn’t know you had it in you,’ he said admiringly. ‘I didn’t know she had it in her,’ he told his kids and anyone else who was prepared to listen, which was every single soul in Marsden. Nobody had thought Millie had it in her or had ever entertained the possibility. They were, to a man, woman and child, as stunned as Lambert had been and then, just as quickly, as proud and supportive. Nobody from Marsden had ever done anything like that before. Millie was grateful for the support and the good wishes but had no need for either. Her plans had been forty years in the brewing. She already had everything worked out.

  With the help of the internet she’d found enthusiasts with similar interests and, with their eager assistance, identified hundreds of ancient walkways and rights of way crisscrossing Britain, Ireland and northern France. She’d found enough information to keep her walking for the rest of her life if she so chose, without ever retracing her steps.

  So Lambert and Millie remained happily married despite being separated by oceans and continents. Millie was happy because she was at last free to follow her own path. Lambert was happy because he was free to continue doing what he’d always done. There was no need to get lawyers involved, or to sell the house, which was located above a tiny kink in the coastline north of Marsden Beach. Millie had often sat out on the veranda looking over the tiny bay that fronted their yard to the fine line where ocean became sky and hinted at the endless possibilities beyond. Lambert also loved the location, but for his own reasons. He loved it because he could launch his boat safely from the tiny beach in almost any wind. They didn’t have to sell the Land Rover either, which, while it wasn’t the most comfortable of vehicles, was perfect for launching the boat. And they didn’t have to sell the boat. That was the main thing. Having to sell the boat would’ve broken Lambert’s heart.

  Money wasn’t an impediment to their contentment. Lambert retired with adequate superannuation, which was the primary reason his father had encouraged him to join the bank in the first place. It might seem strange today that superannuation had been a priority to a boy just leaving school, but that was the way people thought in those days. And as things turned out, who’s to say Lambert’s dad was wrong? Lambert’s and Millie’s needs were simple, their wants few, and the funds flowing into their separate bank accounts each month were more than enough to cover their outgoings.

  Did Lambert miss Millie? Of course he did. He missed the comfort of her presence, their conversation and companionable silences, the sandwiches she cut for his lunches and the dinners she cooked for him. His tea had always hit the table promptly at five thirty and was always followed by pudding. Nobody could make rice pudding, bread-and-butter pudding, trifle or banana custard like Millie could. There were times when he felt Millie’s absence acutely, but he never stayed down for long. If friendships are wealth, then Lambert was one of the richest men on earth. He regarded everyone in town as his friend and the sentiment was reciprocated. It may sound a strange thing to say of a bank manager, but Lambert was universally liked.

  As a bank manager, Lambert was in a position to know who was doing things tough and it wasn’t at all unusual for him to turn up on their doorstep with a few ‘surplus’ snapper to ease their burden. Sometimes they were young families having a bit of a struggle; other times they were people who, through no fault of their own, suddenly found themselves unemployed or struck down with sickness; sometimes they were just old, often lonely people who welcomed his company as much as the fish that he brought with him. When Lambert retired and Millie disappeared over the horizon, nothing changed in this regard. Lambert kept his ear to the ground and little escaped him. People in need still found fresh snapper and kingfish on their doorsteps.

  It’s fair to say that Lambert’s friends — which is to say, the whole population of Marsden — came to rely upon his largesse. No celebration passed, be it wedding, engagement, anniversary, twenty-first or wake, where Lambert didn’t contribute at least two big fish he’d caught and smoked. People took his contribution for granted. Ladies brought a plate bearing their speciality — rolled asparagus sandwiches, creamy sponge cakes, meringues, savoury sausage rolls — and Lambert brought smoked fish. That was the way things happened, as immutable as night follows day.

  In the first six months following Millie’s departure, Lambert sent her letters regularly, telling her all about the fish he’d caught and who he’d given them to. He wrote to her while she was following an ancient trail through the hills of South Wales, past medieval abbeys, Celtic hill forts and old market towns, across turnstile and footbridge, through wood and pasture, set on a course that would lead her unerringly to Stonehenge. She wrote back asking him to stop writing to her. She didn’t do it unkindly. She just pointed out that she knew what the letters would say before she opened them. She knew he’d catch fish and give his ‘surplus’ away to the needy. That was also as immutable as night following day. She suggested he’d be better off saving the postage and only to contact her in case of sickness or emergency. Lambert might have been miffed except for the fact that he understood her point completely and, anyway, she’d signed off, ‘With all my love, Millie’.

  For twelve months Lambert had no need to contact her. Then the unthinkable happened. Nobody, least of all Lambert, could believe it. If someone had dropped a section of the old Berlin Wall across the main street in the dead of night it would not have caused a greater disruption to the life of the township. It was as though the earth had suddenly shifted on its axis, as though some Supreme Being had suddenly rewritten the rules, as though nothing could be relied upon any more. And what was the nature of the catastrophe? Unbelievably, incredibly, Lambert stopped catching fish. The most reliable fisherman in Marsden simply stopped catching fish.

  The problem came to light when Lambert’s old Maori mate, Hika, died. Nobody, but nobody, could believe their eyes when Lambert turned up at the wake empty-handed. Hika had had a passion for Lambert’s smoked snapper. Everybody knew that. Whenever Lambert’s smoked snapper hit the table, Hika had always been the first to attack it. He liked to rip the fins off and suck out the sweet pieces of flesh between the bones, and then go for the back of the head. If anybody deserved to have Lambert’s smoked snapper at his funeral, it had to be Hika. The omission was as glaring as a bride failing to turn up at her wedding.

  Lambert told anybody who’d care to listen, which was everybody present and some people twice, how it had come about that he had no fish to bring. None fresh. None in the freezer. None in the smokehouse. None at all. It just didn’t seem possible and everybody listened with justifiable concern.

  ‘Every time I get the tides and the phases of the moon right, the wind suddenly springs up from the south,’ he said, and everyone nodded sympathetically. They all
knew about southerly winds.

  ‘If it doesn’t blow from the south, I get hit by squalls just as I’m trying to set the anchor. Anchor doesn’t hold.’

  Everybody nodded sympathetically. They all knew about squalls.

  ‘When I pick a calm day to go in close after the kelpies, the swell picks up without warning. Tell you what, there’ve been times when I’ve been lucky to get away in one piece.’

  Everybody nodded sympathetically. They all knew what could happen when the swells came up and you were fishing over kelp close into cliff faces.

  ‘So no fish,’ said Lambert unhappily. ‘Here I am at Hika’s wake with no smoked snapper to commemorate his passing.’

  The workers at the local cemetery froze with their shovels in the air. They swore they heard old Hika turn in his grave.

  The following Sunday, God’s representatives at the local Catholic, Anglican and Presbyterian churches all mentioned Lambert’s misfortune and suggested their congregations remember him in their prayers with a plea for normal service to be resumed. Everybody told him he was just going through a bad patch and his luck was bound to change.

  It didn’t, and all the prayers went unanswered.

  Lambert thought he’d give things a rest for a while, so they could settle down and he could start off again afresh. He thought it would be a good opportunity to give his boat a bit of a spring-clean from stem to stern, a lick of paint or varnish where necessary, and also give his twin forty-horsepower Yamaha outboards a service. Although there was virtue in maintenance, in his heart Lambert knew he was just engaging in displacement activity. The world didn’t stand still just because his boat was fast on its trailer. Couples still got married or had anniversaries, people celebrated turning twenty-one, turning forty, turning fifty and so on. The townsfolk started dropping by Lambert’s house just to warn him that an occasion was coming up which would, of course, require his presence. The subtext was that a contribution of two or three nice smoked snapper had been written into the catering arrangements. Then there were the hard-luck stories. People were still doing it tough and it broke his heart that there was nothing he could do to help.

  Lambert readied his boat and filled his bait box with fillets of kahawai, mullet and bonito. He threw in a slab of pilchards for good measure and also made a special pudding with tuatuas, pipis, mussels, flour, a particular brand of cheddar, a sprinkling of blood and bone and several other ingredients which he steadfastly refused to divulge. The result was a pudding the colour of oysters, with a consistency that made it cling to hooks like a spinster to the last eligible man in town, and a flavour which snapper, terakihi and porae found, without wishing to overstate the case, worth dying for. He made a burley by crunching up the shells of the shellfish he’d used in his pudding, added chicken pellets, scraps from the butcher, scrapings from the pub kitchen and brought the mix to a special pungency by stirring in a third of a bottle of tuna oil. He cleaned his reels, serviced the drags until they were silky smooth, sharpened his hooks, renewed his traces and honed his filleting knife. Lambert had never been better prepared for his favourite pursuit. But a howling nor-easter set in that lasted two weeks and blew away any hopes of wetting a line. He couldn’t believe his luck. Nobody else could either.

  When he was finally able to make it out to his favourite possies, setting out at night to catch the rising tide beneath a clear sky with a first gibbous moon looking as fishy as all hell, the snapper were strangely absent. Either they’d gone deep to escape the turbulence created by the nor-easters or they’d simply gone off the bite. He saw fish on his fish finder but in patterns that were unusual. He caught little red scorpion fish — all mouth and poisonous fins — which the locals ironically referred to as grandfather hapuku. He also caught disgusting yellow eels, which was never a good sign. Lambert hadn’t a clue what was going on. When he returned home empty-handed night after night he began to wonder if he’d run over a Chinaman, walked under a ladder or allowed a black cat to cross his path. There was simply no rational explanation for what was happening to him. What was even more galling, tourists up from Auckland launched their boats in broad daylight and fished the bottom of the ebb tide in places that Lambert knew were unproductive, but returned with fish boxes heavy with fish. Not just with snapper but kingfish, kahawai, trevally and the odd John Dory. Nobody could understand it. For the first time in his life, worry lines began to appear on Lambert’s normally contented face.

  Lambert, for so long a pillar of the little community, lost standing. It was as though he’d changed and was the lesser for it. Lambert the ex-bank manager and provider of fish became Lambert the lost soul. Even worse, he became someone who failed to meet his obligations and who let people down. The townsfolk didn’t know how to take him any more and weren’t quite so certain where he fitted in. When he went to the pub for a beer, drinkers detoured by his chair on the way to the Gents so they could give him a sympathetic pat on the back, the kind you might give a dog you knew was soon to be put down. It was humiliating. Lambert wore the town’s disappointment like a cloak of shame. It wouldn’t have surprised him if he’d got home one day to find someone had left a couple of ‘surplus’ snapper at his front door.

  Joni Mitchell said in her song that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. Lambert finally understood what had left his life when Millie had walked off. He missed her dreadfully. She would have known exactly what to say to him to make things better or, if not better, at least bearable. Even their companionable silences would have been a comfort. She’d kept in touch by way of postcards and, in his despair, Lambert turned to the last one she’d sent him. It gave an address in Cornwall through which she could be contacted in an emergency. In an emergency. Lambert couldn’t imagine circumstances that would constitute a greater emergency. He picked up his pen and wrote to her.

  Lambert calculated five days for his letter to reach Britain, another day to reach Cornwall, a day for Millie to post her reply, and a journey of similar duration for it to reach him. In the end he had to wait twenty-one days not thirteen, three fishless weeks of unrelenting rain and blustery winds. When he opened her letter he expected a wave of sympathy and understanding but copped a wake-up call instead.

  ‘Well, what did you expect?’ the letter began.

  If Lambert had been capable of retort he would’ve said, ‘Anything but this.’ He poured himself a calming beer and sat down in his overstuffed armchair, all the better to absorb the shock of her opening words.

  ‘Well, what did you expect?’ he read again. The letter continued in much the same tone.

  ‘Ever since I have known you, Lambert, you have taken from the sea and given nothing back. You have consistently taken more fish than meets your needs and have been happy to take the credit for those you have so generously given away. The generosity was not yours, Lambert, the fish were not yours to give. You were simply the instrument of Nature’s generosity. It was Her generosity, not yours, something you have consistently abused and failed to acknowledge.

  ‘I know you have no comprehension of what I hope to achieve by following the Celtic path, beyond touching base with my Celtic origins in some mystical way. I also know you have scant respect for ancient wisdoms, and probably regard Stonehenge as simply some primitive people’s idea of a garden feature. But I have been to the mountain in Wales where the stones of Stonehenge were quarried, and followed the path all the way to their resting place. Most people with even a casual interest in Stonehenge understand the astronomical significance of the placing of the stones but have absolutely no comprehension of how they got there. Lambert, I have walked the path the stones took and let me tell you, it’s no stroll in the woods. How did they do it? How did they carry those monoliths over mountains, across rivers and streams, how did they move them at all?

  ‘In trying to learn more about the Druids I have reached an appreciation of Druidry. I may physically walk the Celtic pathways but I have begun to follow the Druidic Path. The Druidic Path is a way of
life, a way of living in harmony with nature.

  ‘Do you know, Lambert, physicists today believe that for the universe to make sense mathematically we have to accept the existence of eleven dimensions. I can think of five: length, width, breadth, time, space. If they are five dimensions, what are the other six? Do you also know that in accepting the existence of eleven dimensions, physicists also believe we should accept the probability of there being parallel universes. What do you think of that? Mind-boggling, isn’t it? These are facts I discovered on a late-night BBC program I watched in Polperro and they got me thinking.

  ‘You know, it is easy to discard the wisdoms of old simply because they are old. How can an ancient people possibly be as smart as we are with all our schools, universities, books and technology? The Druids probably never even considered the possibility of there being eleven dimensions or parallel universes, but they were aware that there were forces far beyond their understanding at play, and did their very best to live in harmony with them. They had more gods and goddesses than you can poke a stick at. I’m aware of three hundred and seventy different names of deities and there are almost certainly more. They ascribed responsibilities to each of these gods as a way of bringing order and understanding to their world.

  ‘Why am I telling you this? I am telling you this because the Druids probably experienced what you’re going through in the formative years of their beliefs. They learned from their mistakes and the learning became the foundation of their beliefs. Stonehenge played a significant part in their ceremonies but not nearly as much as their groves of trees. I have found remnants of oak groves, the trees clearly planted in Druidic order. Even today, followers of the Druidic Path continue to plant these groves. They are sacred, peaceful places and I delight in just sitting in them. The point is, the Druids took but also gave. The Druids took from Nature but also put back, sometimes in symbolic or sacrificial form, but also by way of new plantings. They did this to appease the forces they could not understand, but also because the system clearly worked. Yes, Lambert, it worked. They didn’t plunder and destroy, uproot and leave barren. They worked with Nature. They were farmers and conservationists, hunters and conservationists, hewers and conservationists. They took but they gave back. They kept their lives in balance.