Free The End of the World by Paddy O'Reilly Page A

clear, almost white sky. Mr Kato and I wore waterproof jackets to protect us from the spray and the sharp wind. Each time we went fishing he brought along the pair of jackets, and he always insisted that I wear the new, bright yellow one while he wore the one that had originally been green but was now grey and streaked with crusts of salt. After a time, the jackets had become a necessary part of the fishing day. Having often thought about how the bright yellow of my jacket was so conspicuous against the colour of the water, I would have felt uneasy going out to sea without it. It was a false sense of reassurance–the jackets were only raincoats, not lifejackets–but habit is comforting.
    Our lines had been slack in the water for about twenty minutes when I realised I should be talking. I had been thinking about Rosa, an old girlfriend back in Australia. Once we went on a harbour cruise together. The harbour glittered with the sunshine reflected off white buildings perched on the hills, and we sipped champagne and smiled at each other over the rims of our glasses. Rosa started to complain about feeling nauseous. As a breeze blew up she vomited over the side of the rails and the wind whipped the vomit straight back into her face. Poor Rosa started to shriek.
    I ran to the kiosk and bought ten bottles of Perrier to wash off the sick. She sat down on a deck chair with her head between her knees, swearing and crying and hiccupping, while I stood next to her and poured bottle after bottle of water over her head. I was about to open the last bottle when she stood up and screamed at me, ‘You bastard, can’t you do anything besides pour fucking water over me?’ Of course I didn’t know what to say. What should I have done? No one had ever vomited all over themselves in front of me before. I glanced at Rosa’s face and was frightened by the fury in her curled lips. I had never realised she was so volatile. I thought, Rosa will never seem the same to me now–our friendship has been spoiled.
    ‘I wonder why people get seasick?’ I said to Mr Kato.
    ‘Sick? If you are sick you should vomit into the sea. Good bait.’ He laughed again. ‘You see? Obsession.’
    Mr Kato was my landlord. He charged me half the rent his Japanese tenants paid, and in return I spoke English with him for two hours twice a week while floating in a dinghy on the sea near Hitachi City. Mr Kato wanted to practise English. His English was excellent, but he wanted to practise having intellectual discussions in English. When he found out that I had a master’s degree in seventeenth-century European literature, he told me that I would be a fine conversation partner.
    ‘Do you know about European literature?’ I asked him.
    ‘No, but I can see that you are an educated man,’ he answered.
    He was particularly thrilled when he heard I was studying Japanese before I took the foreign service exam in Australia. Diplomats are expected to speak several languages, I told him.
    ‘You will be an ambassador!’
    ‘No, an employee of a diplomatic post. But everyone in the post has an important role to play.’
    I paid my rent to Mr Kato on the last Friday of every month, and he would have the receipt already written out and sealed in an envelope. He never counted the money in front of me and I never read the receipt.
    We had already caught seven fish between us and thrown back three undersized ones in the hour we had been fishing. The four captives swam around in a large pink bucket up near the outboard motor. Occasionally I would hear a splash as one tried to leap out of the bucket to freedom. When we arrived back at the shore later in the afternoon, Mr Kato would take the fish out of the bucket one by one and kill them with the heel of his fishing rod. I wished he would use a knife, or a stone, anything to vary the routine, but Mr Kato embodied routine. Each time the butt of his fishing rod connected with the head of a fish, he grunted, then inhaled with a