The walkers now refer to him as, 'that bloke who catches nothing and doesn't seem to mind.' They are comfortable with him.
Lately, the fisherman listens to the squawky calls of sea birds, knowing the differences between red-billed and southern black-backed gulls, pied shags and spotted shags. The most common one is the eastern bar-tailed godwit, even though they breed on the Russian Arctic tundra. 'I know how you migrate,' he occasionally says to them. 'You don't have to wait in queues to have your passport verified before you go through customs and are checked for bombs.'
His favourite bird is the welcome swallow, a small demure bird, flying greater distances than all others, often never coming to earth for many seasons, including the ability to eat insects, go to the toilet and sleep in the air, dreaming.
The fisherman's wife no longer asks him what he is doing, having grown tired of his reply that is now a cliché, 'going fishing.'
'You never catch anything,' she might say.
'I catch a lot,' he replies.
'What?'
'You'll know one day.'
His business is in undertaking, SFS (Sensitive Funeral Services). The company is also flying, but in a different sense, almost as if the public know he is a fisherman who never catches anything, yet does not mind, day after day. He is that patient. He is that reliable in the turbulent world of today where even fish are threatened with survival. He always has sympathy for the besieged.
The weeks become months that become years until the couple seldom talk to each other. She takes more interest in being a grandmother than being an undertaker's wife. He takes more interest in being a fisherman than being a husband. Indifference might be complete except both remember when passion was not just a fruit and soared above words to embrace them both.
Memory is their instinct.
So it is that the gap between the fisherman and his wife is large by the time her interest in fashion and their grandchildren wanes. Nobody looks at her anymore, other than seeing a woman with artificially coloured hair whose body has spread out with age, wrinkles growing, no matter how many times she puts skin softeners on, rubbing them in more fervently than she cooks a meal.
She feels old.
The season is autumn. She decides to cross the bridge of memory and regularly talk to her husband again, aware his fishing days are growing, along with his belief that undertaking is a craft (or graft) that is not in a personal sense. His replies have developed a token similarity, as if she is a member of a grieving family. 'Never mind, dear,' he nearly always says.
No longer does she feel angry or superior to his technique of withdrawal.
She gets up from bed early one morning to find him having a cup of coffee in the kitchen. 'Love,' she tells him when she sits down in the chair opposite him, sounding as surprised as he is. 'We are still together.'
'So we are.' He grins as if the whole idea is humorous. 'You can never tell what is on the current.'
'Or the breeze,' she replies, gazing upwards out the window to where she believes flocks of birds are flying.
'Fish can also fly,' he tells her.
She blinks in startlement. 'You're kidding?'
He shakes his head. 'There have been cases in various parts of the world where shoals or flocks of fish have landed in fields and towns.'
'They seem to have missed us here.'
'So far.'
'One day the fish might fall on us all. That would put the fish shops into disarray since we will all walk outside and there the fish will be without freezing, soft and friendly.'
'I haven't thought of it like that.'
'You won't have to fish anymore,' she says brightly. 'That's what you should consider.'
He says no more, putting on his fishing jacket and heading out into the weather, rain threatening to come down from dark clouds. It is a cold one, he thinks, just as well she isn't with me for whatever reason she got up so early for. She can be a weird one, he thinks.
It does not rain.
It is eight o'clock. Light has now entered the city, casting away the dark clouds. The swallow is beyond sight, flying higher and higher above the earth. The fisherman is thinking of the bird as he wonders if he will throw his line into the water, how the small creature floats in the high air, above weight, above hunters and disease.
He is very fanciful.
The fisherman is standing at the estuary edge, now moodily watching the sharp current swing against the rock he is standing on, wondering if he will slip away into the water, no longer flying but briefly surfing before the current claims him with barely a gurgle.
Out of the side of his eye he notices a woman walking towards him. Must be a fitness freak, he thinks as she paces briskly along with her arms swinging up and down. 'You need to cast your line out,' she says when she draws near.
He blinks.
'You'll get what you want,' she adds.
'You know?' he asks.
His wife nods, even if she does not completely understand why he is doing this, other than he has become overwhelmed by the profession of burying people. He has built up SFS for most of his working life and has now gone past the enthusiasm door, believing there is only so far you can go with any working life. He has reached the turning point, fishing for dreams more and more.
'We'll fish together,' she says suddenly.
He blinks, feeling her turn into a swallow that joins him in the upper atmosphere, faraway to the north and a warmer sun. They are soaring. The river current agrees, impressed as the fisherman's wife slips one of her hands into his and kisses him on the cheek.
The couple gazes out into the estuary to nod gently to themselves.
