Time Is A River

Readers, my good friends Angie and Bendigo asked for particular types of story.    I've combined them below. 



Berkeley cast the line, flicking from the wrist as he knew his father had taught him. He focused his mind on the small things; the creak of his wrist, the whirr of the line feeding out, the ripples bracketing the float, the lap of the water against the boat’s flanks. Years of training and education allowed him to focus this way. Nothing could get in the way now.

He hadn’t fished in the fifty years since his father died, but his muscles remembered the rhythm of it. He set himself comfortably on the little seat and hooked his arm around the rod. The boat drifted but his mind did not. He watched the water skaters on the surface and did not think of the process he was attempting. He drifted with the flow of the river back towards that which he had forgotten and which he desired to know.

He had been over and over the memories on the edge of the last fishing trip countless times, in leisure, in therapy, in frustration. He had become interested in time during his efforts to recapture it. As a scientist, he had hidden his obsession but never escaped its grip. Einstein’s theory that time was like a river had the taste of synchronicity for him. He knew his father had always taken him fishing. He knew that chunks of his life had been torn from him on one of the fishing trips. So much of what happened seemed to be tied to the river. Now that he was nearing the end of his career, the moment seemed propitious.

He drifted with the flow of the river. He had walked its banks for years, seeking the memories that eluded him. If he could reach what he had lost, reach it by releasing his mind to follow the river into the past, then maybe he could rest at last.

Now, although he turned his mind away, he noted that the banks were different. The path was a track worn by people walking and not laid neatly out as a tourist trail. At the curve where he would have expected a new house, there were only trees. He drifted on, his back to the bow of the boat and the flow of the river, the rod held loosely, the line trailing.

He knew that the loss of his father so early had to have affected him. Counsellors had told him. Women had told him. He knew that they should have been right. In his heart, though, it was the loss of the time, the loss of the memory that affected him. He was eight when his father died and in the fifty years since, the itch of the missing was still with him. He had been scratching at it so long that it had become an agony. He could barely remember his father’s face, but the hole, the vacuum in his mind, was a greater torment to him, he who had spent his life in pursuit of knowledge.

Something pulled at the line but he didn’t move the rod. It didn’t bite again and he felt no weight on the line. The boat drifted in the middle of the stream.

He remembered watching the woman who said she was his mother, so anxious about him, cleaning and crying and telling him stories about his life. After a while, he remembered almost all of it. But not the fishing trips. Not the last one, ever.

He felt the boat curl around another bend in the river, bringing him closer to the past. He heard the voices, at first too distant to be recognised. The timbre of the man’s voice echoed in his mind and he remembered the smell of his father, so close, remembered the bristle of his moustache.

The other voice was high and full of unshed tears. His throat tightened. The voices, one deep, one high, came closer and the boat bumped against something and stopped. Berkeley turned and saw the island. It divided the stream of the river and, although tiny, was covered in trees. He knew that there was a clearing at the centre. He put the rod in the bottom of the boat and stepped out.

The voices stopped but then he heard a sound that he knew. The rattle of keys in a pocket as trousers were dropped. He walked on through the trees and into the clearing.

The man was sitting on a tree stump, his trousers down, his big hand on the back of the child’s head. Berkeley’s throat muscles contracted and a sound escaped him, half curse, half sob. They turned to look at him, a frozen and dreadful tableau. The boy’s face was wet with tears.

Berkeley didn’t hesitate. He couldn’t. He lunged across the small clearing, fury tasting like blood in his mouth. He swept the child aside and fell on the father. The struggle was vicious, frenzied. The child sat where he had fallen and stared in silence. When it was over, Berkeley stood up and looked at the blood on his hands, looked at the crumpled body at his feet. He turned to the boy and tried to speak to him, but there was nothing he could say. The boy’s face was waxy, his eyes blank. Berkeley carried him back to the boat and rowed him to the side. With the boat trying to escape from under him, he put the boy on the river bank, being careful not to step out himself.

There was nothing else to do. He left the boy there, knowing that he would be found soon. He brought the boat back to the centre of the river and set his mind on his life and his work. He started to row and, in time, made his way home.