THE ANGLER

Sometimes the cruellest people are those who pick on the weakness in others...

Two years passed with amazing alacrity as Oliver recovered from his head injury and then left hospital. And while he struggled back to normality all sorts of things had to be sorted out. His mother was still in prison, where she would stay until he was well into his adulthood, and as Bert had suspected, the Big Interferer that might be called Kindly Authority wasn’t at all happy about a single man in his middle years having sole responsibility for a young boy with problems.

That difficulty was solved by the huge generosity of Edna and Ian Birtwhistle, who lived next door to Bert and offered to foster the boy. It all took time, of course, but they were of unblemished character, had a clean but slightly untidy home (looked on as a plus) … and the boy’s education wouldn’t be disturbed as he could continue at the same school.

Only he couldn’t, because during the time he took recovering from what had been a nasty attack and months-long coma he became too old for the Junior school he had happily attended, and had to move on. But then, so did everyone else in his class, so the disruption was of a relatively minor nature. It was just the school was different with loads more pupils from a much wider area.

The change should have been happy, but it wasn’t. News got around that the boy with the sometimes-glazed look on his face had a murderess for a mother. Now, why that should have meant that anything but kindness should be shown to Oliver was a shock to everyone who knew him, but in reality it meant there were some who thought bullying the boy was the right thing to do.

It wasn’t punching, though pinching was involved, quite severe pinching from some of the girls in the school, which was unexpected. But the worst aspect was the verbal bullying. The way names got invented for him, names designed to hurt because they reminded him of a huge vacuum in his life, names that referred to a notion of someone so unlike his own incarcerated mother they were thankfully diluted by their very lack of similarity to her. After all, he’d long looked upon Jocelyn Anchovy has his mum until she was killed, and he’d almost forgotten the woman who’d given birth to him.

That was two murders involving maternal figures, something that offered the bullies a new but seemingly related thread with which to weave their cruelties.

“What’s the matter, Olly?” asked Bert, who was determined to keep in touch with the boy at all costs, and still took him fishing down the lake whenever he could. It was obvious that Oliver was unhappy for most of the time, and he hated seeing it.

Olly didn’t spill his personal beans straight away. For a start, it was embarrassing and embarrassment can be a painful thing in itself. So he just shrugged his shoulders, put on a determined face and said, “I’m okay, Bert.”

He called him Bert these days because he couldn’t call him Dad, not when he used that word for the equally likeable Ian Birtwhistle who now fostered him and was beginning to advise him on the niceties of shaving and explaining to him there was no need to do anything about the profusion of pubic hairs that were sprouting and that Oliver had mentioned in troubled passing. They were, he said with a wicked twinkle, very good at keeping a lad’s willy warm in winter.

But Bert didn’t believe that he was okay and when he caught Oliver crying he was sure that he was right.

“Things that seem wrong can often be put right,” he said to him when they were by the lake. “I know that, and I’ve lost the biggest treasure of them all, don’t forget. And I don’t mean as it’s been put totally right because it hasn’t and can’t be, not in a million years. But I’ve still got your friendship, you who loved her like I loved her, and that goes a long way to helping.”

And those words opened Oliver’s floodgates and he told Bert about all the pinching and taunting, none of it at all much if isolated as little bits and pieces and put into simple words, but all of it, when put together, a huge offence against a boy who had already suffered too much … and would continue to suffer, he’d not been quite the same since his months of coma and sudden recovery. Because, reasoned Bert to himself, a recovery is never exactly a recovery, is it? There’s always a shadow left behind, and he could see that shadow in Olly’s eyes.

“I’ll help you sort it,” he said, and Oliver had never seen such a ferocious look in his kindly eyes before. Not even when a much despised pike had got away, a dirty big fellow who rumour said had occupied the deepest waters of the lake since Noah dropped it in way back after the flood.

But what was best was the way Bert had said help. Oliver didn’t want his troubles sorting for him because that would never work properly anyway, but he did need help.

“What shall I do?” he asked, miserably.

“It’s not what you shall do but what we shall do, us and that school of yours,” said Bert, thoughtfully. “You just keep yourself to yourself for a while, don’t do or say anything to rile the nasties, and I’ll see what that headmaster of yours has got to say about what goes on in his school.”

“If they find out...” said Oliver, troubled.

“They’ll only find out if someone tells them, and I’m not planning to do that,” nodded Bert. “Are you?”

Oliver shook his head. “I’ll keep mum,” he said.

Two weeks later Oliver got the shock of his life when the whole school was gathered together in an unusual assembly to hear a special talk from an important visiting speaker on the subject of fishing.

The speaker was Bert, and he was in his best suit. Oliver had never seen him in that suit before … it was the one he’d worn at Jocelyn’s funeral, but Oliver had been in his coma for that.

“I’m a fisherman with trophies,” began Bert. “I like to sit on my own by the waters and look to see what can be seen, always on the look out for giant Mr Pike. He’s a monstrous creature and the waters will be safer for other fish when he’s done and dusted. And I’ll get him, mark my words, I know I will.

“You see, fishing’s more than just catching tiddlers and throwing them back. Fishing’s a job for real men who want to preserve the good in the world by teasing out the bad, and there’s a lot of that. Let me tell you what became of my wife...”

And without so much as a glance at Oliver he painted, in simple words and with a sombre face a picture, not of the attack and all that blood and a dead body, but of what it left behind. It left a broken hearted man, husband, lover.

“You’ll all know about being lovers soon enough,” he said with a twinkle in his eyes. “And when you do you won’t want any filthy bullies” … he used that word here for the one and only time in his talk, except for at the end … “to take it away from you.”

Then he returned his words to the fishing lake, told the assembly about the natural order of things and how it must be preserved or lost, and how he planned to be the man to take old man pike out of the equation because, he said, “because that old man is the bully I won’t let win...”

Not once did he mention Oliver and his troubles, but after then the name-calling, the pinching, the loathsome bullying stopped and one particular girl, a lass with bright blue eyes, was seen from time to time gazing at Oliver with a specially thoughtful look on her face, and guilty eyes.

© Peter Rogerson 17.12.16