Free Once by Andrew McNeillie

the tackle shop.
    But what solitude and solitary determination. The sand sucks and socks about his spade. In these wetter reaches the going’s heavy, and the worms are quick off the mark. He’ll chop one or two perforce, and stain his fingers yellow. But hook-length pieces will do, and then he’ll start to take some whole, reddish worms, and here and there a big black one, of a length to make up for two or even three lesser mortals. The moment he turns one he darts in like a gull to pick it out. The gulls are already hovering and shrieking hungrily round the molehills and water-holes he’s left behind him. Sometimes he has to hold onto a worm for a while and little by little ease it back from its urgent escape, trying his best not to let it break in two.
    Soon he’ll have to cut his losses. Some hooks will have half a worm, some a whole one. The tide has turned by the time he’s driving his stakes into the sand with the back of his spade. His line’s not straight but set across the tide in a ‘V’, arms open to it. It seemed like a very long line when he had it in the backyard, but now it’s dwarfed by the wide shore. The sea is almost over his wellingtons as he baits the hooks. His bait tin swirls this way and that swimming on the flood, as he keeps it looped over his forearm. His spade, planted in what was clear sand, falls as the water undermines its footing. He mustn’t lose it. He has one eye on his hooks and can, and one eye on where his spade was when he last saw it, and struggles to bait the last couple of hooks. He’s in over his boot-tops and his jeans are wet well above the knee by the time he’s done.
    As he turns to leave the shore he realises the figure up there leaning on the rail is his father. Alarm shoots through him, and mars the occasion. It’ll soon be dark, he realises. But no, whatever worry he’s had, it’s all right. He’s greeted happily. It’s all right, and they walk up together, pausing to look through the dim and darkening light to see the big trout that lives up the drain pipe, opposite the public lavatories. Is he there? Can you make him out? Look, there he is, his nose at least, beyond the end of the pipe. He’s big. How big is he? A wonder no one’s ever caught him but folk must have tried or he wouldn’t be so wary.
    That trout intrigued me, tempted me. The stream ran quite deep and dank there, below a stout wall of dressed stone, just up the road from the railway viaduct. The tail end of a steep municipal garden petered out there, below the Priory on Cefn Road. On the opposite bank a path bordered at its end by a clump of canes led over a flat, concrete, railed bridge to the road and shore. The stream was then channelled under the promenade to the beach through a big round tunnel. You could straddle your way up that tunnel to the shallow last reach of the stream. Or should you have nothing better to do you could ricochet pebbles and cobbles down it and make a great echoing watery racket.
    At high tide on a wild day sea-water might be punched up into the stream in its lowest reach. But here beside the road the water was pure of brine, however otherwise impure, and clear, except after sustained heavy rain. I didn’t obsess about the big trout but now and then he swam in and out of my thoughts. And I would plot his downfall when he did so. It was no good leaving a line there overnight. Someone was bound to notice, and take it, or beat you to the fish. Not that it’d be safe to eat it anyway, living where it did. I grew up to know it mattered that what I caught and killed might be eaten, and this it was that kept the big trout safe, at least for now.
    But I remember well the afternoon I did for it – as with my snare I did for the big buck rabbit on the railway embankment above the Irish Sea – with tough resolution and Black Lake know-how. I hooked it out on a coch-y-bonddu dangled and twitched