‘Cormorants’

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Cormorants

IT WAS HERE at last – Learning at Work Week, the annual opportunity to ease some of the bureaucratic grind and elevate himself, and possibly his colleagues, to a place of greater happiness. In amongst the thicket of e-mails rearranging his priorities, assigning further tasks without renegotiating existing deadlines, he’d already delivered two seminars locally on haiku: Birds (with a plethora of feathery examples from the classical literature) and Fuzzballs (squirrels, foxes and assorted other furry urban-dwellers).

He got them comfortable, ran through a PowerPoint on the history of the form – putting Issa’s randy houseflies to extended use – then broke and invited them to leave the building, walk around outside with their eyes open. Then he led them haiku step by step: observations, connecting images to small line-bursts of emotion, paring it back to an essence that fused the elements into something higher.

Next up was a trip north, to Pitlochry and the fish people.

But first he had to rewrite this damned Education circular. One message responding to the initial issue, bristling with exclamation points, had pointed out its flaws: did he realise it took two long drives, expensive harbourside parking, a return ferry trip and three days in total to get her child to the dentist, from the island in question? Could he possibly take this into account, in the next edition of his little pamphlet? It was a fair cop, but he would soon be done, and leaving mid-afternoon for the Freshwater Laboratory, and tomorrow’s final workshop: Fish.

‘You finished, Neal?’ asked Karen. ‘Need to zip that across to Mal for the stats, then whatshisface to get it set.’

There was an acid note under the banter. He glanced at his watch, then stuck his head over the rim of his cubicle. Two hours, forty nine minutes and – thirty eight – seconds to go.

‘Almost – be right with you!’

Outside, something slithered up to the edge of the abandoned dock, plopped in. A gull honked past indifferently.

He got back to work.

*

There was no travel money for the trip, and the day and a third came out of his holiday allowance. No subsistence, either, so he’d packed peanut-butter and banana sandwiches, hoped to find somewhere cheap in the woolly wilds.

But still Neal felt his spirits lift as he waited for the carpark barrier to rise. The Circular was done, on its way to the printer’s; he would come back to something concrete from the latest stage in his ‘fast-stream journey’. At home, Daniel was working his usual hours – hours paid far better than his own – and he didn’t expect to hear from his partner till he pulled back into the driveway. Neal rolled his shoulder, tuned the radio and got comfortable.

Pitlochry, here we come!

On the back seat was a warm stack of prints. No screen or projector was available, so he’d gone old school: handouts, scratch paper, a box of pencils filched from the School Inspectorate’s stockroom. He’d amended his slides a bit, made them proper handouts, and he smiled as he remembered the examples.

Draining the ricefield –

a fish also

heads home

(Issa)

Or

Old well,

a fish leaps –

dark sound

(Buson)

They were delightful, and he hoped to see some really specific, salty work emerge from the experts. Daniel had shuddered. He was on his way from vegetarianism to veganism – it seemed a lot easier now than years ago – and could see the joy in flying birds, small mammals scuttling around the undergrowth. But fish?

‘Ugh – reminds me of Fridays!’

Craig, the genial organiser of L@WW, didn’t get it either. He’d made Neal a cup of tea, adding three sugars.

‘Birds, alright – majestic, an that. Poetry. Foxes, too. Slinkin around winkin wi’ cunning. But fish?’

‘Well, yes – fish.’

‘Don’t they sorta – ya know, sit there?’

‘Sit there?’

‘Under yon riverbank, or swirlin about a bit in the tank. Swim round. Dinnae do a lot, duthay?’

Neal had scratched his chin, taken a sip of the awful tea. Then it came to him – cormorant fishing!

‘Well, you might have a point, at least in regard to ordinary fish. But we’re talking about Japanese fish. There’s this thing where they hoist up cormorants – ’

‘Seabirds?’

‘Yeah, only on rivers – inland. Hoist them up, tie a sort of snare around their necks, then train them to dive down and yank out the fish.’

‘Don’t they just eat the fish?’

He looked a little less perplexed, though the fish seemed a bit passive in this peculiar miracle.

‘No. That’s where the snare comes in. It constricts them a bit, so they swallow the little tiddlers – that’s their payment, I suppose – but makes them hold the larger fish, the ones the fishermen want, in their gullets. They hoick them out, reset the snare, and start again.’

Craig scratched his chin, took a long draw on his sugary brew.

‘Alright, but yer actual fish, right – ’

‘They’re part of the process, which is interesting. Listen, fishy folk will love it – trust me.’

And he thought they would.

The thought sustained him down the shore and towards the bridge, into the long trek up the motorway.

*

For the first half-hour things were pleasant enough, but after a while he began to feel the effects of the coffees he’d drunk cramming the Circular. After he’d switched to a smaller road, the amenities dried up and a string of brief, tantalising vistas – rolling valleys, low tree-capped hills – opened up ahead. It was uncomfortable; then pressing; then he began to feel like a bag of liquid horrors waiting to burst through from another dimension. He sped up, sweat breaking out on his forehead.

Eventually he barrelled round a corner and a sudden turn, large enough to warrant its own traffic-island, appeared on his right. He floored the brake, screeched into a gravel car-park. ‘House of Froward, the sign said. It seemed to be some sort of fancy clothing store, with a visitor’s centre and café attached. Whatever! He locked up and scuttled across the car park across a patio studded with navy-blue umbrellas into the café.

Inside it was small, more like a fish and chip shop than a proper sit down place. Still, at first glance the food looked alright, the prices surprisingly reasonable. But first things first.

Neal beamed at the first of three staff behind the counter.

‘Where’s the gents, please?’

He was hopping from foot to foot to damp down the raging ache in his abdomen.

‘No toilet.’

‘Sorry?’

‘No toilet here. You go to next town.’

‘What?’

But the man had turned away, his two colleagues suddenly attentive to the task in hand.

‘But this is a restaurant!’

Ordinarily, the flinty resistance of the civil servant would have kicked in, and he would have demanded to see the manager – the manager’s manager – about such a public outrage. But if he didn’t get to a toilet shortly he would cause his own outrage, so he fled back to the car and the main road, pulled off as soon as the slightest bit of roadside vegetation offered a minimal screen, and disappeared into the bushes.

A full minute later, with a suspicious-looking red-leaved bush dripping, his hands wiped on the tops of a stand of damp ferns, he stepped back over the low guard-rail and sat for a minute, spent. The anger had gone – well, almost – and in his relief, he looked round, checked his watch. Quarter to six. He still had more than an hour to go. The roadside was quiet, and he could see between two pine trees and the gash in the bushes into which he’d darted to the hills on the far side. The air was fresh; the view (dripping bush aside) quite pleasant, and he felt like stretching his legs.

He did it all the time at Alexandra Quay, but only ever between his desk and Karen’s, or down through the atrium to get coffee. Contrary to his seminar instructions, he usually kept his eyes firmly shut.

Now his feet crunched over gravel washed to the side of the road by passing lorries, and he picked up a stick from a divot in the metal rail, gave it a tap as he passed. It bonged, off-key, and he smiled. At the top of the hill he turned back, determined to forget all this nonsense and get in early to the hotel, perhaps have a beer and put his feet up, leaf through his fishy gems for tomorrow.

At the car he pulled back his arm and sent the stick whickering through the air. It turned at the last minute, revolving in its normal course, and sailed unimpeded between the top two branches.

*

Neal had originally planned only two sessions – birds and fur. Both local, both focused on generalities: the dawn chorus, foxes making sweet love by the bins, blackbirds digging for worms in freshly-turned earth. All the small delights his new-haikuists were certain to have encountered. But Craig scratched his head.

‘Tea?’

‘No, thanks. Happy to slot them in whenever you need them, even pop down the road.’

Craig stirred his plumber’s brew.

‘Look, Neal – I was thinking. You’re one-a my best folk. You do this every year, people enjoy it, and when the sign-in sheets go round, yours fill up richt away.’

‘I enjoy doing it – takes me back to a different life, makes a nice change from Karen, at least for a few hours.’

‘Yeah – I geddit. Should ask her to do ae course on micro-management, next year.’

‘Nano-management!’

Craig grinned. He slurped his tea, held up a finger.

‘But, young man, I’ve a bit ae a dilemma. Most o’the courses – yours, juggling, home-finance, joys ae urban chickens, ya know. They’re here, Edinburgh, in one ae yon two big buildings, or at a stretch, Glasgae.’

‘Well that’s where everybody is.’

‘No everybody.’

‘Ninety percent of them, surely?’

‘I’ll gae ye that. But there’s a few scattered round who get a bit vocal this time of year. Stirling, soma the rurals, ya nae. Pitlochry.’

Neal looked him square in the eye with his best flinty Education Department squint. It did no good.

‘Come on – be good fer ye. The drive alone’s a tonic.’

Neal sighed.

‘What do they do up there?’

‘Fish, mainly, but not, ya know, the out-at-sea kind.’

‘Fish.’

‘Yeah – yer know, lil salty flippers wi the funny smiles. There’s a bloke called Henry Shadbolt pushin fer somethin.’

In the sudden silence, Neal could hear Alexandra Quay going about its sorry business, clueless about birds, furry creatures and fish; knowing little, and caring less. The sound of self-satisfaction hummed on regardless. Craig took a triumphant slurp.

‘I’ll even call Karen for yer, clear the way. Howzat?’

*

Half an hour more, and the road seemed to roll on in pines and vistas and moody grey skies, seemingly forever. It wasn’t unpleasant. Daniel had this huge project, and his company was still primarily working-from-home, so every moment of stress and pressure radiated out from the spare room into the confines of the flat. Neal knew he had to be bringing home an equal amount – of rage, most likely – but could seem to do nothing about it.

Up ahead, a small ‘P’ sign indicated a stopping-place, and he decided to pull off and stretch his legs. The refuge of the road was fine, but he could use some cool and silence – even better, a cup of coffee and a bacon roll. The parking place came up after a stand of trees. There was a wheelie bin, a baby’s stair-gate abandoned in a bush – heaven knows how that got here – and, praise be, a burger van at the far end. He could see another car parked beyond, the driver handing money in through the hatch. He got out quickly and shook out the tension from his legs, trotted down to the van.

‘You’re working late!’ he said. The man inside just nodded, angled his head at the board. Soon Neal had a hot roll and coffee. He walked back towards the car and noticed a gap in the scrub, to the left of the baby gate. It led a short way down a bank, between two pines and out onto a small ridge above a stream. There was a weathered picnic bench, another bin beside it. The trees screened the noise of passing cars, and he sat down to eat with a sense of gratitude for the scene. Just what he needed, right when he needed it. It was not a familiar feeling.

He remembered talking to Shadbolt, the coordinator at the Lab.

‘Aye,’ Henry said. ‘You folk tend to forget us, up here in the woods, but we’re part of government, too.’

‘Oh, I don’t doubt it, Henry,’ Neal said. ‘Not at all. It’s just that – ’

‘Too busy, are ye – wi the big bosses, an all?’

‘Well, yes, but it’s not that. Or not entirely that, you know.’

‘Well, what is it?’

And suddenly Neal was unburdening himself.

‘Well, Henry, it’s a lot of things, actually. To start with, it’s my boss – you don’t really need to know her name. It’s Karen. Karen is a bloody nightmare – nitpicking everything down to the atomic level, and do as I say, not as I do. When I got here I had to call the movers to arrange a date for our stuff to come out of storage. She leans over the cubicle wall. “No personal calls.” Okay – weird, but then she goes back into her own stupid little hole, and makes a call to her car insurer! Then her bloody boyfriend. And – well, you don’t need to know the whole sordid history. Suffice to say she covers all her deficiencies with our achievements, and doesn’t give a flying fuck about anyone but herself.’

There had been a rather significant silence on the line.

‘What the hell,’ Henry said. ‘Don’t you fancy getting away for the day?’

Now he sat with a bacon roll on a battered picnic table, pinching and yanking at an awkward sachet of ketchup, sipping at coffee between fruitless attempts.

‘Come – bloody – on!’ he said. On the fourth tug it creaked mightily, then gave up the ghost. A spray of sauce dotted the roof of the roll, and he used the dead sachet to smear it over his bacon, closing up the roll and taking a big bite. In the evening cool it was heavenly, sweet, salty and crispy, all at once. He chased it down with a long swallow of coffee. Under the bench, Neal rearranged his legs, crossing and uncrossing them, then finally jammed both feet on the middle rung. It made him sit up straight and look at the view. A car passed in the background, and he heard the other customer get back on the road. The van seemed to be closing down, too.

Soon everything was quiet.

He had no idea where the picnic-spot was; he could be five minutes from the hotel, or hours, or just outside the city. He realised it didn’t matter. What mattered was the stuff under his fingers: the squidgy packet; the soft roll; the heat of black coffee radiating through the double-walled cup. Even the gnarled wood of the table itself. Someone had chiselled an insult, or an endearment, into its surface – so long ago he couldn’t tell which. He sat still, enjoyed the stillness.

After a few minutes the wildlife wised up, resumed its business. A squirrel dropped to the spongey turf from a nearby tree, did a quick side-to-side reconnaissance, tufty ears pricked up and sleeked back, then dropped to all fours and scampered across the clearing. A blackbird cawed, somewhere out of sight, and what he thought must be a magpie – really just a blur of black and white – streaked across the middle distance like some secret, flashing signal.

Neal smiled. He wished Daniel was here, and not sweating out his latest assignment. Then, just as suddenly, he wished to stay alone. There was something satisfying about this moment, and he wanted it to endure. Perhaps he didn’t get enough of them, or what he did manage to snatch from the constant flow of demands in the office, was insufficient – the sort of observation his seminars tried to banish, in favour of a longer, more dedicated look.

He thought about the cormorants again. That thin silken cord, wrapped just so, in order to allow the bird to follow its natural instinct to dive, to chase and capture, but coming back to the surface, permitting only the smaller fish to slip down its waiting gullet. The rest were caught, trapped like – well, bigger fish – and levered out of its maw into wicker baskets. He could imagine the calls of the men from one flat-bottomed boat to another, the squawks of the birds, the relentless splashing of the waters in the background. He wasn’t sure which of the figures he identified with – the supreme fishermen, sleek and deathly in silent pursuit, or the men standing idly by till simple technology stole the best of the catch.

He'd hoped to convey something of this cultural complexity to his students. They knew all about fish, or so Henry said; their habitats, behaviours, tendencies and characteristics. Just the sort of specific knowledge, derived from close observation, that drove the best, the seemingly-simple haiku whose sparse lines – when written well – conveyed turbulent depths.

But he had reached the bottom of his coffee, and nothing much was happening in the clearing. Another car went by, here then gone, and he thought of the office: its low-walled cubicles and endless chatter; new demands heaped up, one another, on the old; the latest version of the Circular swarming up from the deep with a bellyful of corrections. Suddenly his neck tightened, gorge rising as if squeezed up by some invisible cord.

Neal stood up quickly, dumped his rubbish and got back in the car.

He started for home.

James Roderick Burns is the author of one flash fiction collection, To Say Nothing of the Dog, and five collections of short-form poetry, most recently Crows at Dusk; a collection of four novellas – The Unregulated Heart – is also forthcoming in summer 2024. His stories have twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and he serves as Staff Reader in Poetry for Ploughshares. He can be found on Twitter @JamesRoderickB and his newsletter ‘A Bunch of Fives’ offers one free, published story a fortnight (abunchoffives.substack.com).