The Fishing Trip That Almost Wasn't

In the village of Heathermoor, where the June mornings arrived early and golden and the air smelled of cut grass and wildflowers and the particular sweetness of a proper English summer getting into its stride, there lived a girl named Jess. Jess was nine years old, had dark eyes and short practical hair and a laugh that was slightly too loud for indoors, which her teachers mentioned occasionally and she paid no attention to whatsoever. She liked climbing things, knowing how things worked, and her dad.

Her dad was called Rob. He was tall and broad shouldered with kind eyes and large hands that were good at fixing things. He worked long hours at the garage on the edge of the village, fixing cars and vans and occasionally a tractor, coming home in the evenings with oil on his hands that never quite washed off completely, which Jess had always thought was rather distinguished. He made excellent cheese on toast. He was the best person to watch a film with because he laughed in exactly the right places. He had coached Jess\'s football team for two seasons, even though he freely admitted he knew very little about football tactics and mostly just tried to make sure everyone had a good time, which Jess thought was actually the correct approach.

The thing her dad loved most in the world, besides his family, was fishing.

Not the competitive kind, not the kind where you kept score and compared catches and cared very much about who caught the biggest one. Just the quiet kind. The sitting beside a river on a summer morning with a rod and a flask of tea and absolutely nowhere else to be kind. He had been doing it since he was younger than Jess, taught by his own dad on the same stretch of river that ran through the water meadows on the edge of Heathermoor.

Every Father\'s Day, Jess tried to give her dad a good present. Last year she had made him a photo frame out of lolly sticks and put a picture of the two of them in it from the previous summer, standing in the garden both squinting into the sun and laughing at something that neither of them could remember now. The year before that she had bought him a book about the history of engines that he had put on his bedside table and actually read, which Jess considered the highest possible compliment a book could receive.

This year she had decided to do something different.

This year she was going to go fishing with him.

Jess had never been fishing. She had watched him go many times, seen him pack his bag the evening before with the careful attention he gave to nothing else, checking his tackle box and his line and his flask and his sandwiches. She had seen him come back in the early afternoon looking relaxed in a way he rarely looked any other time, as though the river had ironed out something in him that the rest of the week had crumpled.

She had never asked to go because she had never been sure she would like it. Sitting still for long periods was not Jess\'s greatest strength. Quiet was something she appreciated in theory more than practice. And she was not entirely certain about worms.

But this was Father\'s Day. And the point was not whether she liked fishing. The point was that her dad loved it, and spending the morning doing something her dad loved, beside him, seemed like exactly the right kind of present.

She told her mum the plan. Her mum smiled in the particular way she had when something pleased her genuinely and said it was a wonderful idea and she would sort out the sandwiches.

Jess did her research. She looked up fishing for beginners on the library computer and read two articles and watched a short video. She learned about casting and about sitting still and about not making sudden movements near the water. She learned that patience was the most important quality a fisher could have, which she considered a significant personal challenge and decided to treat as something to work on.

She did not tell her dad. It was a surprise.

On Father\'s Day morning she woke up early, earlier than she usually managed on a weekend, and went downstairs to find her dad already in the kitchen in his fishing jacket, filling his flask, clearly planning to go alone as usual.

He turned when she came in and looked surprised to see her up.

\"Morning, love,\" he said. \"You\'re up early.\"

\"Happy Father\'s Day,\" said Jess. \"I\'m coming fishing with you.\"

Her dad looked at her. Then he looked at the flask. Then back at her.

\"Really?\" he said, and the way he said it, quietly, with something careful in it, told Jess that this was exactly the right present.

\"Really,\" she said. \"I\'ve done research.\"

He laughed. \"Of course you have. Right then. You\'ll need wellies and a warm layer, it\'s cool by the river in the mornings.\"

They walked to the river through the water meadows as the sun was still low and pale in the east, the grass soaking their boots with dew, the air full of birdsong that seemed impossibly loud for so early in the day. Jess\'s dad carried the rod bag and the tackle box. Jess carried the rucksack with the sandwiches and the flask and two apples and a packet of biscuits that her mum had added to the bag with the instruction that they were not to be eaten before ten o\'clock, a rule that both of them silently agreed not to enforce too strictly.

The river was beautiful in the early morning. It was wider than Jess had expected, slow moving and greenish brown, reflecting the willows that leaned over it from the far bank. The surface was very still except for the occasional ring that appeared and disappeared where something moved beneath. Dragonflies hovered in the reeds. A grey heron stood absolutely motionless on a stone downstream, so still it looked painted.

Her dad chose their spot on a flat grassy bank where the river curved gently and an old willow tree provided a little shade. He set up both rods with the practised ease of someone who had done it ten thousand times, showing Jess each step quietly and clearly, not rushing, making sure she understood before moving on.

The worm question arose.

Jess looked at the worm in the small container in the tackle box. It was pinkish and energetic and extremely wriggly.

\"You don\'t have to,\" said her dad.

Jess thought about the research she had done and the video she had watched and the fact that she had come this far.

\"I\'ll do it,\" she said.

She did it. It was as unpleasant as expected and over very quickly and she felt genuinely proud of herself in a way that was entirely disproportionate to the size of the achievement, which was fine.

They settled on the bank. Her dad showed her how to hold the rod and how to watch the float, the small orange tipped thing sitting on the surface of the water that would dip and dart when a fish took the bait. They spoke in low voices the way you do near rivers, as though the water requires a certain respect that comes out as quietness.

The first twenty minutes were peaceful in a way Jess had not quite anticipated. She had expected to find the stillness difficult, and there were moments when her legs wanted to move and her mind went off in several directions at once. But there was something about the river that helped. The slow movement of the water. The sound of it against the reeds. The way the light on the surface shifted constantly, never the same twice.

She began to notice things she would have missed if she had been moving. A family of moorhens picking their way along the far bank. A flash of extraordinary blue that was a kingfisher, there and gone so fast she almost doubted it. A water vole swimming strongly upstream, its small whiskered face just above the surface, completely unbothered by anything.

\"Dad,\" she whispered.

\"I saw it,\" he said. He was smiling.

At half past eight Jess\'s float dipped. She almost missed it, her attention having drifted slightly towards a cloud that looked remarkably like a sleeping elephant.

\"Jess,\" said her dad quietly. \"Your float.\"

She looked. The orange tip was under the surface. Her hands tightened on the rod.

\"Lift it gently,\" said her dad. \"Steady.\"

She lifted. She felt a resistance on the line, a living pulling weight, and her breath caught. She reeled in slowly the way he had shown her, keeping the line taut, and brought the fish to the surface.

It was a small roach, silver sided and bright eyed, flipping in the morning light. It was the most beautiful small fish Jess had ever seen, which admittedly was not a category she had thought much about before but felt very certain about now.

Her dad helped her hold it gently in the water while she took the hook out carefully, and then they both watched it dart away into the green depths and disappear.

\"That was amazing,\" said Jess, and she meant it completely.

Her dad looked at her with the expression that she always thought of as his proudest look, the one that reached his eyes before his mouth caught up.

\"You\'re a natural,\" he said.

They ate their sandwiches at ten o\'clock, or possibly slightly before, sitting side by side on the bank with their boots off and their feet in the cool grass. Her mum had made cheese and pickle for her dad and ham for Jess and had wrapped them in foil and cut them diagonally without being asked, which Jess noted and appreciated.

Her dad poured tea from the flask into the two small cups that nested in the lid and they sat drinking it in the comfortable silence of two people who do not need to fill every moment with words.

The heron downstream had not moved in two hours. Jess had begun to wonder if it was real.

\"Dad,\" she said.

\"Mm.\"

\"Is that heron actually alive?\"

Her dad looked at it for a long moment. Then the heron, as if it had heard and decided to settle the question, turned its head slowly, stepped off its stone with tremendous dignity, spread its enormous wings and lifted away upstream in long slow wingbeats, clearing the willows and disappearing into the blue of the morning.

Jess and her dad both watched it go.

\"Alive,\" said her dad.

\"Extremely,\" said Jess.

They stayed until noon. Jess\'s dad caught two more fish and returned them both. Jess had one more bite that got away before she could react, which was frustrating for approximately thirty seconds and then became a good story. They ate the apples and had the biscuits at eleven and talked about all sorts of things in the easy, wandering way that happens when there is plenty of time and nowhere to rush to.

Her dad talked about fishing with his own dad when he was young, on this same river, in this same meadow. He talked about the things his dad had taught him, not just about fishing but about waiting and watching and finding the quiet in things. He talked about it simply and without sadness though his dad had been gone for many years, the way you talk about good things that happened and are glad they happened.

Jess listened to all of it.

On the walk home through the water meadows, the sun properly warm now and the dew long gone from the grass, her dad put his arm around her shoulders as they walked.

\"Thank you for coming,\" he said. \"Best Father\'s Day present I\'ve ever had.\"

Jess thought about the lolly stick photo frame and the engine book and felt pleased to have topped them both.

\"I might come again,\" she said. \"If that\'s all right.\"

\"Whenever you like,\" said her dad. \"The river\'s not going anywhere.\"

That evening Jess sat in the garden after supper while her dad fell asleep in the armchair indoors, which happened every Father\'s Day, and watched the long June light fade very slowly from the sky.

She thought about the silver roach in her hands and the flash of blue that was a kingfisher and the heron lifting away on its wide wings and the river going on quietly underneath all of it.

She thought she might like fishing after all.

Not every week. But sometimes. On summer mornings when the world was still and the river was green and slow and her dad was beside her with a flask of tea and nowhere else to be.

She went inside when the stars came out, quietly so as not to wake him, and climbed the stairs to bed.

Outside, the June night was warm and soft and full of the small sounds of summer.

Heathermoor slept.

*The End.*