Gone Fishing - My shortlisted story for the Sheffield Short Story Competition
The Sheffield Hole in the Road was a major landmark which was demolished in 1994. For myself, my main memories of it are from when I was a child looking at the fish in the tank. I’d be taken to see the fish on shopping trips with my mum. The fish and the Hole in the Road inspired my short story which was Highly Commended in the Sheffield Short Story Competition. I read it alongside other Sheffield winners last night. What a lovely event it was. Here’s my story:
Gone fishing
He was there at the start and he was there at the end. He knows this and the old man knows it. But no-one else. If they asked him, he could tell them all about it. But no-one does ask him. Still, he has his memories. Back then, he was television, trapped behind a glass screen, a flash of technicolour in the grey concrete of a day. What they didn’t realise was that, to him, they were the show, that their stories unfolded right before his eyes, day after day.
He remembers them still. People say that his kind have a short attention span and it’s true, perhaps, that his mind isn’t as sharp as it once was. But he still remembers them. He remembers the girls on window-shopping lunchbreaks at Walshes and the boys with wide trousers strutting past, fags in fingers, heels clicking on the echoing floor. And he recalls the night in June when the boy with the yellow shirt finally plucked up the courage to kiss the lass in the brown cord skirt on the curved bench opposite. He liked to watch the lovers. Marriages were made and promises broken in that auditorium and he witnessed it all.
He witnessed other things too as the years went by. Skirmishes and scuffles, flung insults and smashed bottles and once, a knife slashed across a throat, blood pooling by the newsagent’s door. If they’d asked him, he could have told them that it was the young man with the leather jacket who did it, that he hadn’t meant to kill the lad, things had just got out of hand. But no-one did ask him so he has kept it to himself all these years. He has no choice, though sometimes he wishes they were right about his memory; there are some things he would rather forget. Like the night when the cold crept into the bones of Old Jim. And the sound of the young woman’s head cracking so hard against the wall that he could feel the reverberation, ripples in the water.
Memories are ripples now. But here the water flows fast in gushes and eddies. Here he swims freely. Sometimes he craves the lights again, wishing he was centre stage where the children congregated with their mouths open, fingers pointing at the latest attraction. But he enjoys his retirement. Life moves on like the river and he moves with it. No-one knows what’s around the bend. And sometimes round the bend it’s him, the old man, Geoff, sitting by the side of the Don, dangling his rod alongside the others. Once he let himself be hooked just in the hope of seeing a flash of recognition in Geoff’s eyes, though his lady friend said he was crazy and grown sentimental. But for a moment, he swore, Geoff remembered their journey to the river when the hole was filled in. ‘Hello fella,’ he’d said, and then, for the second time, he’d set him free.
