Crabtree had originally pencilled in The Boxing Day treat as an expedition in search of the legendary duck-eating monsters of Sir Hugh Gascoyne’s private decoy, but this little plan had been ruined after he had been ignominiously blackballed, and barred from the Conservative Club for cheating at cards. In a panic, he had rescued the day by procuring tickets for a club lake in the neighbouring county, where pike fishing was allowed on condition that any fish caught were killed immediately. As a precaution, he had booked under a false name in case the blacklist extended beyond the immediate locality, but quite reasonably assumed that in any case, on the day after Christmas, the bailiff would be far too occupied in the pursuit of unconsciousness to perform his tiresome duty of checking credentials. Peter dutifully loaded the car, while his father stumbled groggily on his third excursion to another noisy interlude in the toilet.Peering slit-eyed over the steering wheel, Crabtree manoeuvred his vehicle through the early morning gloom as the roads glistened in the beam from the headlights. Suicidal rabbits narrowly escaped a bloody demise on the frosty verges as Peter glanced anxiously at the shambolic, mad eyed, caffeine charged figure beside him.
“Father”, he said, “are their truly thirty pounders in this lake where we are going?”
“Trust me Peter”, he replied, “there are pike in this lake over a hundred years old. They spend most of the time unreachable, at the bottom of a sixty-foot deep hole, and divers who have seen them have shot back up to the surface numb with terror, and spent a week in hospital recovering from the bends. Reliable witnesses have seen them drag fully-grown Alsatians under the water, and a canoeist once had his paddle bitten in half”
Peter glanced back at the hunched, demented figure of his father; his eggy chin and tousled hair protruding in greasy spikes from under his cap, and wondered how he could find out if he had actually been adopted, rather than being the product of his father’s loins, and doomed to inevitable madness.
They turned into the car park as the grey light of dawn cast its misery upon the chilled air. Not surprisingly, they found themselves alone. Next to the car, a bin made from a rusting oil drum had overflowed its contents onto the floor. Cans and bottles were strewn around, and the air crackled with static from the overhead power lines. It was not the image that Peter had been conjuring up in his mind. He unloaded the car with the resigned air of someone whose past experiences have taught him to expect such disappointments. Father emptied his bladder, aiming at the empty cans, rolling them over the concrete.
After negotiating the drooping wires supporting the broken concrete fence posts, and crunching along the littered pathway through the bushes, the lake itself was a bit of a pleasant surprise. Admittedly, the bent and broken garden chair did little to add to the atmosphere, but the occasional reed beds held promise, and the air was tinged with expectancy, though with the added piquant tang of dog dirt.
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