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

hiss.
    I am not squeamish. I have never cared particularly for fish, or worried about whether they feel anxiety or pain. Yet in the last few weeks, I had found myself turning away each time he reached into the bucket, pulled out a squirming fish, laid it on the wet, black boards of the pier, and raised the rod.
    On our trips we never strayed far from his favourite spot. We took the train to a station two stops down from Hitachi City. From the station we walked a few hundred metres, past a dozen stalls selling bait, down to the pier. We ignored the man trying to rent us a cruiser with a cabin below deck and polished brass fittings, and kept walking until we came to an unpainted wooden lean-to at the end of the pier. Before he paid the hire fee for the same dinghy that we rented every time, Mr Kato chatted to the old woman inside the shack about the weather conditions.
    ‘Good fishing today?’ he would call up from the boat as the woman hobbled out to cast off the mooring rope.
    ‘Always good fishing here,’ she would answer, then wink at me.
    Mr Kato was unaware that I understood their little joke. When I first met him I was new to Japan and could only say hello and thank you in Japanese. Now I could understand and speak a little of the language, enough to follow simple exchanges. But even after I understood the words of their joke, I didn’t follow the meaning until one day I boasted to a friend about how many fish Mr Kato and I caught, not occasionally, but every time we went fishing.
    ‘That’s no surprise,’ said my friend, who had been living in that area for ten years. ‘You’re fishing offshore from a commercial fish farm. What with the ones that get away and the ones that come for the food that filters out of the farm drains, you couldn’t fail to catch fish.’
    ‘Chaos,’ Mr Kato said. ‘Chaos.’
    The slap of water on the sides of the boat and the warmth inside my jacket often put me to sleep while we fished. I woke, but kept my eyes closed for a moment against the glare.
    ‘Chaos,’ I said. ‘Yes, chaos. If a butterfly flaps its wings in China, there are storms over America.’
    Mr Kato shifted his haunches abruptly, something he rarely did when we were fishing. The boat listed, then righted itself. He lifted his head until the peak of his baseball cap was saluting the sky, and he squinted through the sunlight at me.
    ‘I heard that too! It was in a film. And...’
    ‘There was a book.’
    ‘Yes, by someone...’
    ‘An American...’
    ‘Yes, an American...’
    After all the hours we had spent drifting and bobbing along the same stretch of coastline, I knew most of the landmarks. There was the Princess Hotel, with a revolving restaurant like a crown on its head. To the south was the Tenju Exhibition Hall complex, always displaying a different banner advertising a car show or electronics exposition. The banners were huge and faced out to sea, where only tiny figures like us in fishing boats could see them. To the north were the Hitachi factories, turning out electrical appliances, and further north, the great white dome of the atomic power station.
    ‘I don’t really understand chaos theory,’ I told Mr Kato. ‘I never read the book.’
    ‘I don’t understand relativity,’ he said. ‘Space and time. Curved.’
    ‘Postmodernism, I don’t get that either.’
    ‘Or people. Sometimes I don’t understand people.’
    Mr Kato’s rod bent down into the water. He leant back with the rod straining against his grip, and he reeled in a few inches at a time, chuckling softly.
    ‘C’mon, sweetheart,’ he murmured, and I could hear myself in his voice. Like a good student, he was picking up the vernacular.
    ‘Reeling in a sweetheart,’ I laughed. ‘This must be love!’
    ‘This must be love,’ he repeated, still reeling in line.
    He was a clever mimic. I knew that one day I would hear him say again, ‘This must be love.’ He would say the words exactly as I had said them but would