Standing in the middle of the shallow stream, wearing dark green waders and casting out his line, the Fisherman eyes me with a strange mixture of tired disdain and fatherly familiarity.
“You should listen to your elders and betters, ya know?” He speaks with seriousness and urgency behind the façade of friendliness. “My kids are about your age and they’re exactly the same. Always pokin’ their noses in where they don’t belong. Bitin’ of more than they can chew…”
I stand on the bank, sceptical but knowing instinctively somehow that the words that the Fisherman is saying are important. I glance around and see that we’re standing in a narrow valley with no trees or buildings nearby. Weathered limestone boulders jut up through grass that’s thin, short and nibbled down by the regular grazing of sheep. The stream is clear, fast-flowing and only a couple of feet deep. I idly wonder if there are any fish to be found in there but the Fisherman is unconcerned. He continues with his lecture.
“Mark my words, sonny. You’re already in deeper than you know. Here I am, up to my waist in water, reeling ‘em in…been doin’ this crap fer years and I sure as hell know where the rapids are and where there’s sommat tasty t’catch. You kids could get bitten by sommat awful and never know until you’ve reeled in your line…”
The Fisherman rambles on with his metaphors as the ground beneath my feet takes a sudden lurch. Is it an earthquake? Dream-logic throws up one possibility after another, but the Fisherman, the surrounding area and the rushing stream are unaffected.
“…what I’m sayin’ is, you’ll be in over your head pretty darned soon and there’ll be nothin’ more I can do t’help you. You didn’t notice the warnin’ signs we sent you already? And now I’m here, having t’spell it out to you like this.”
The ground starts to sway under my feet as the bland grey of the rocks and the vivid green of the grass take on a multicoloured tint. The voice of the Fisherman takes on a tinny, warbling echo as the whole panorama breaks down like a failing analogue television signal. I feel a wave of nausea hit as the Fisherman looks on with what is now genuine concern.
“I’ll try to get in touch with you again, sonny. Before it’s too late. Hate to have it pan out like this, what with you bein’ so close to her an’ all…”
*
I didn’t remember waking up. I had, however, somehow crawled from my bedroom to the bathroom with what must have been superhuman tenacity, and prepared to throw up in the sink. Just as I was wondering why I hadn’t opted for the toilet, or indeed whyI hadn’t thrown up yet at all, I saw her standing in the doorway in her pyjamas with a towel over one arm.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Head…hurts…metallic taste on my tongue…” I rasped back.
“That’s the worst hangover I’ve ever bloody seen.” She turned around curtly and returned a couple of minutes later with a glass of water. The remains of two soluble tablets drifted lazily downwards inside, like a pair of miniature depth charges, fizzing as they went. “This might help.”
She sat down on the floor of the cramped and immaculately-cleaned bathroom and refused to leave until I finished the glass. The flavour of the tablets mixed badly with the peculiar taste in my mouth; it was worse than orange juice and toothpaste. Steeling myself, I finished the second half of it in one gulp.
“You’re not going anywhere today,” she ordered. As if I had any intention of doing otherwise.
“Huh? It’s just a…ouch…hangover. It’ll clear up in a couple of hours.”
“You seriously think that’s all it is? I saw how much you knocked back last night and you didn’t even bring anything up. Something’s wrong.”
I wasn’t in any mood to argue. Staggering back to my room, I made it as far as the living room sofa. She brought my dressing gown from my room and draped it over my shoulders. As my thought processes began to reconnect, I realised that she was right. We weren’t exactly sober when we got back but we’d gone to our respective rooms in a fairly orderly fashion after drinking a reasonable amount…and the food would’ve soaked up most of it. The thought of the food didn’t even initiate a gag reflex, but the headache was no better.
“I’ve got work today but I’m guessing Stu’s still got yours on lockdown. Are you going to be okay here while I’m out?” Her voice took on a softer tone but a bizarre ringing in my left ear, like simulated tinnitus, started to drown her out. I assured her, unconvincingly, that I’d be fine. “Just give me a ring if it gets any worse.”
“Sure,” I replied. “I’ll keep an eye on that album you had saved on that online auction too.”
One of her hobbies was collecting music in dead formats. A shelf in the living room was dedicated to the things: cardboard sleeves, jewel cases, digipaks, keepcases; CDs, laserdiscs, even a minidisc or two, all in various stages of disc rot or general wear. Steering clear of the cliché of vinyl, she instead amassed an enviable collection of digital media that were forgotten and abandoned during the course of the previous four decades: there was a thriving little subculture of people who had a thing for this outdated and unfashionable digital-era stuff, and rarities sometimes fetched considerable sums at auction. This one wasn’t particularly valuable, but she’d wanted a copy of it for herself for a while.
Apparently the auction was due to end mid-afternoon and I had already promised her that I’d make a bid for it on her behalf before someone with a strategic advantage – an imagined stereotype of some jobless obsessive hoarder in his parents’ basement who had the spare time to lie in wait for it – got there first. In my current state I was in an even better position to do this than I’d anticipated; I was usually tied to a terminal for most of my working day but I literally did have nothing better to do all day today.
My part in this pastime of hers had started with an offer to use digital audio recovery software to restore missing data from some of the recordings that were in the worst condition, but she was as interested in the packaging and information booklets as much as the content itself (which could, in many cases, be found online in a dedicated audiophile Cloud anyway). Before long I was following her around second-hand shops and trawling online listings to track down these quirky little pieces of a bygone era.
I hoped that today’s auction would take my mind off the nagging headache, so after she had got her work-related things together and cycled with furious determination into town I unrolled her spare terminal screen and proceeded to hang it on an uncluttered patch of the living room wall. The screen she used most often, framed in untreated pine, looked more fashionable (not to mention more environmentally-conscious) but for tasks like this I preferred the larger and flexible screen that could be set up wherever it was needed. With that hung on the wall in a comfortable position and my handheld successfully synched, I was ready to stake out the sale.
*
In between periodically checking the sale’s listing, I had another look at the online profile of the client that my employer had been working for. Behind the typical corporate sheen of the public online presence (a fancy term for what online designers called the replacements for traditional web pages), it was strange to see the variety of affiliate organisations. Most conglomerates were little more than umbrellas for smaller companies that had been absorbed, merged, split up by court order in the name of ‘fair competition’; in many cases it was a laughable exercise in sister companies competing against each other, with the outright winner still being their parent company.
As such there was usually little underlying logic behind the choice of takeovers. Like hungry bottom-feeders that roamed the ocean floor, the big multinationals swept up and absorbed smaller organisations without any apparent discretion; in this case though I was sensing some definite pattern in the profiles of our employer’s corporate siblings and was racking my brains to make the connection between them.
Sadly I wasn’t really in any fit state to make sense of that, so went back to the task at hand. It was a special edition of some indie band’s album from a decade previously that came in a peculiar novelty case; assuming we won the sale I’d probably have to volunteer myself to be at home to sign for the thing when it was delivered unless her more flexible work schedule allowed otherwise.
As expected, there were a couple of obsessive collector types eyeing it up but in the end it was a fairly straightforward purchase since neither seemed prepared to match the maximum buyer’s price that I’d been instructed to offer. Unsure about whether it was a worthwhile thing to own in the first place, I wired the payment over straightaway and went to the kitchen to see if the cupboards had somehow miraculously replenished themselves.
Unsurprisingly they hadn’t, but the headache and that annoying tinnitus made me decide that I wasn’t particularly hungry anyway. Assuming I was suffering from some strange side-effects of dehydration and general tiredness, I switched on the kettle and prepared myself for a boring afternoon of green tea and aspirin.
*
By early evening, when I heard the sound of a bicycle lock and footfalls on the stairwell outside, I was on my fifth cup of tea and the painkillers were engaged in a war of attrition with whatever was causing the throbbing inside my skull. She found me huddled in front of the terminal’s screen with the curtains drawn, the screen’s contrast and brightness turned three-quarters down, surrounded by empty tea-stained mugs and half-deaf in one ear.
“Feeling any better?” She asked, tossing her bag into her bedroom and flopping down at the other end of the sofa.
“Nope. This sure as hell isn’t a hangover,” I answered. “You won the auction, by the way.”
“And you spent the whole day staring at that thing with a headache?” she admonished me incredulously.
“This is as likely to be eye strain as it is alcohol. I dunno what it is, but I swear sitting here like this hasn’t made it any worse.” I received a casual ‘humph’ in response. “There’s this maddening tinnitus in my left ear, too.”
“You sure you don’t want to get that checked out?”
“I’ll book a doctor’s appointment tomorrow then if you’re so worried about it. Aren’t you even remotely excited about getting that thingummy-whatsit’s record or what?”
She moodily yanked out the long looped hair tie that had been keeping her tresses coiled up while she’d been cycling and, after deftly winding it around her wrist, went over to her terminal and lightly tapped the corner of the pinewood frame.
“You didn’t have to sit there all day just for that, you know,” she pointed out. “I’m sure another one would’ve cropped up sometime. Those guys weren’t all that obsure from what I’ve read.”
“It was that special edition one with the longbox CD case; I thought you’d want one of those. I sent the payment straight across, too.” She gave a brief half-smile by way of thanks and switched her terminal onto standby with another sharp tap to the edge of the screen.
“Since I still have my shoes on and you’re not really fit to go all the way out to the corner shop, dinner’s on me tonight.” I made an effort to get to my feet but didn’t quite make it. “I guess it’s soup for you then, right?”
“Yeah, sorry. I really don’t think I’m up for anything extravagant. That should be easier for you to prepare, anyhow.”
“It’s no hassle. I’m just worried that you’ve been like this all day. I’ve never seen you knocked flat like that, apart from when those chavs did a number on you last week.”
Pausing only to give her cat a scratch between the ears on her way out, she grabbed a shopping bag and made for the door. “I won’t be long. Don’t do anything stupid, like using the last of my teabags.”
After the front door clanged shut I went back to staring aimlessly at the large terminal screen with the names of our client’s numerous subsidiaries and affiliates floating in a simulated cloud, like bees captured in slow motion around a flower. The display format was actually a very accurate representation of how I felt about it: it was as though there were unseen strings holding them together, and those invisible threads were hanging there in midair, silently mocking my as my head continued to throb.