Free Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel by Claire Fuller

father said that Grandpa had held his hand over his face and sworn a great deal, but the hook refused to go forward or backward, and when he shouted for the metal to be cut, my father, responsible for packing the equipment, realized he had forgotten to bring the wire cutters. My grandpa had made my father cut through the skin of his eyelid with the fish-gutting knife to remove the hook.
    By the river, my father unpacked his fishing rod and slotted it together. I watched him for a while, but it took so long—feeding the line along the guides, tying on the artificial fly, and attaching the reel—that I got bored. I wandered upstream and crouched at the water’s edge, turning over stones, absorbed by the tiny creatures running for their lives.
    My father whistled a tune I recognized from home, something I often fell asleep to. I caught the melody andhummed it while I squinted at him. With the sun behind him, he stood in front of the water as if he were conducting it, commanding it to flow. He pulled the line from the reel so that it lay in unravelled loops at his feet. In rhythm with his music, he flicked the rod up and over his head, craning backward to watch the fly streak out behind him. He twitched the rod forward and the coiled line whisked up and through the guides, catapulting out to a patch of sunlight. I looked up and followed it, etching an arc over the blue sky. As the hook touched water, my father jerked his arm up and back, the line and fly following gracefully, and forward again so that they dropped farther out. He repeated the movement once more, until the fly swam in the middle of the current and floated downstream.
    He carried on casting backward and forward, a mesmerising fluid action, something his whole body performed until the rod was an extension of his arm and hand. I walked upstream so the swoosh-whip of the line, cutting through the air, could have been the cry of a bird. The bank was lower where I was, eaten away by the river when it was in full flow. I untied my shoes and took them off. My father had bought them for me at the start of the summer. They were boys’ shoes, dark blue with a white stripe and a leaping cat on the back of each heel. I removed my socks and tucked them inside the shoes.
    The water flowed fast through the middle channel, but where I stood it had pulled back from the bank and left behind a strip of silt. I stepped down from the grass into brown mud which oozed between my toes, cooling my blood.
    Out of the corner of my eye, I could see my father cast the line again. The day was hot and the water inviting; there would be no problem with wading up to my knees, even though my father still hadn’t taught me to swim. Hopping on one foot, then the other, and in the process smearing mud over my legs, I removed my trousers. Mud caked their insides, but I flung them behind me onto the bank and took a step into the water, gasping with shock at the cold and the pain of the stones on the soles of my feet. I stood in the water up to my knees, churned mud swirling around my legs while the current tried to suck me away. It was the deepest I had ever been in and still my father didn’t notice.
    I gave up willing him to turn around to look at me; he was focusing all his attention on the artificial fly out on the water. I came out of the river and sat on the grass, prodding and picking at my numb legs, already changing to grey elephant skin. It wasn’t fair to be the warmest person in the world, sitting next to the coolest thing, and not know how to swim. I wanted to ask my fatherwhether he could teach me right away, but didn’t dare. He cast—up, back, forward, up, back, forward, up, back, forward—until the fly rested on the water. Then the line tightened and he let out a long, low “wowyaa” as he pulled the line through the guides with his hand. There was a flash of heat in my head when I saw how much he cared for the fish. I might have been in the middle of the river, drowning, and