Sheila was the only local of the four of us. Patrick was a kiwi, I'm Lancastrian, and Hudson was from the West Country somewhere.
Rowen, on the other hand, was authentic Sarf Lunnon, Brixton in her native habitat, half Trinidad and half Irish in her heritage. Now, anyone passing a moment's thought over this would wonder why we-indeed I, who share part thereof-were not on a strict and searching enquiry as to the likely veracity of Sheila’s tale. Both islands-fair Erin and balmy Trinidad-have a long tradition of the wind-up and the tall story. Compound these with the native Londoner's insistence that the city excels all others in all matters, and you have a recipe for a first-class fish story.
And there was precedent. London is notorious for spawning bizarre monsters most of which turn out, on closer examination, to be utterly legendary. The infamous Brentford Griffin Incident of 1984 is well known in the literature cryptozoological, and I leave to the interested student further enquiry as to the details of that shabby debacle of the journalistic profession.
There are more, of course:
The alleged man-eating aquatic swine of the Fleet Ditch, said to live in the roofed-over Fleet River to this day.
The Beast of Hackney Marsh.
The Highgate Vampire.
The Spectre of Bleeding Heart Yard.
The Goat of Dollis Hill.
Tonight, though, Rowen was to introduce us to the Wandle Pike.
First, a brief note on the regular, non-legendary, pike. It's a handsome fish, torpedo shaped, cheerfully predatory and ranging in size when caught from two-pound tiddlers up to record weights in the region of sixty pounds. It's the biggest fish found in British fresh waters, challenged only by the big farmed carp that are bred for the real hard-core anglers who want a prey that's capable of taking their arms out of their sockets, is smart enough to plot revenge for being caught and laughs off the puny tackles and rigs of ordinary anglers.
Moreover, the pike, a fish of distinction and cunning, is known to fight back. Looking sort of like a freshwater barracuda, it has been known in its larger specimens to drag waterfowl down to their doom, attack wading anglers and generally provoke fear and consternation. There was even a horror movie made about a giant pike supposedly inhabiting a Cumbrian lake that died a mercifully swift death at the box office. The Wandle Pike made the twelve-foot robotic fish built for that film look like a minnow.
"You intrigue me," said Hudson.
"As well I should," said Sheila, "for the Wandle Pike is truly the finest fish you might take in these parts."
"I smell a Griffin, Rowen, I make no bones about it," I said, injecting the only sceptical note of the evening. Well, not the only sceptical note. Just the last to be heard out of any of the four of us.
"Damned sophist," she replied. "This is not simply some random and drunken sighting, of a beast known a priori to be mythical; this is a documented fish, gentlemen."
Naturally, we called on her to furnish full and complete particulars.
Our calls for the story led to the kind of detailed negotiations that can only arise when all present are mortal hammered and the question of whose round it might be rises to the head of the agenda. Turns out it was me, and between getting the beers in and recycling some I'd taken aboard earlier in the day, I returned to:
"- last time it was caught was in 1974. That was how I got to know about him, it was my Pa that last caught the Wandle Pike. He said it was two feet longer than he was, and he was no small man."
"Yeah, but how long're we talking about here?" asked Patrick. "I mean, respect to your dad and all, but how tall is he? Or was he?"
"My father, you nitpicker, is, was and remains six feet tall in his boots, making the Wandle Pike some eight feet in length when last captured." Sheila tried to draw herself up in dignity as she said this, the effect being somewhat marred as ever by the fact that she was red-eye plastered and talking around the stub of a coffin-nail.
"Eight feet? Surely they don't grow that big?"
"Nah, they do,” said Hudson, betraying a hitherto-unsuspected fund of ichthyological lore. “They keep growing until they die. Fish're notorious for it. They ain't got the genes for old age."
"So how much did it weigh?" I asked.
"Dad never got to weigh him. He got the hook out, damn near lost his hand doing it, and then he was fighting with a fish bigger than he was. As I say, he was no small man. He worked as a docker when he first came off the boat from Trinidad. Well, he got his scale to the thing, and it gave a heave, threw him off, and slithered back into the river."
"And the fucking pudding," came the reply, along with other traditional exclamations of disbelief. Now this was a fish story.
"Just as it was told to me!” Sheila insisted. “Wouldn't have done any good to weigh him in any case. Dad's scale only went up to fifty pounds."
"That's a damn' big fish," said Bobby.
There was a warning sign, if you like. Gone midnight, early Sunday morning. None present close enough to sobriety to poke it with a long stick, and Hudson's got that gleam in his eye.
Enter Welch with petrol for the flames. "Of course, if we make only a few simple assumptions about that fish, we might deduce that it weighed somewhere in the region of two hundred, two hundred and fifty pounds."
"Three or four times the current record." I was inebriated past caring for the consequences of what I was saying. Set in a crowded theatre just then, I'd have been shouting fire.
"That is a damn big fish," said Hudson.
"Of course," said Patrick, now over the recklessness event horizon and collapsing into a singularity of inadvisability, "it'll have got bigger since then. Think about it. It actually held the English record from 1934 to 1938. By 1974 -forty years later-it was anything up to five times the weight of any pike ever recorded in British Waters."
"Damn big fish" said Hudson. "Eight feet long, drawing a foot and a half of water, and capable of wrestling its way out of the grasp of a fully-grown man."
Welch was not to be restrained, although by this stage I was getting a premonition-no second sight needed, just that peculiar clarity of thought that comes after twelve hours of sustained drunkenness-and was thinking about braining him with a barstool. Or just running for my life, and devil take the hindmost.
"Damn big fish," said Hudson.
"Teeth an inch long, his stripes so broad he's almost totally black, his mouth scarred with all the places he got caught in his younger days. And he's been feeding and growing all the while, on God knows what in the Wandle, and probably venturing into the Thames as well. But he's only ever been caught in the Wandle."
"Damn big fish," said Hudson.
At this point Sheila set another round down on the table. I hadn't noticed her get up, and
seeing her come back unbidden with more beer should've set me to running. Any night on which Sheila was buying without being frogmarched to the bar and all but mugged for the price of the drinks was definitely too rum and uncanny for any sensible man to be abroad.
"Gentlemen," she said, "I give you the Wandle Pike."
The Wandle Pike! was the toast.
"Could be anywhere up to half a ton by now," said Welch.
"Damn big fish," said Hudson. "I say we catch that fish."
Well, we received that in silence.
"When?" I asked.
Just then came the fateful cry from the bar.
"Time, gentlemen, please!"
One o'clock in the morning, all of us profoundly drunk, and a Mighty Quest in the offing. A sensible man would have run for cover and tried to forget all about the whole sordid business. Alas, there had been drink taken and, some minor rumblings of self-preservation apart, I sensed the game afoot.
"Right," said Hudson, rising to his feet with a pint and a half untouched before him-thus could his firmness of purpose be measured-“What we need is tackle."
"Hold on," I said, "do we have to catch the fucker tonight? There's a bed calling to me. I need to get a run-up on my hangover."
Bobby thumped the table, redistributing the ash and slops. "No!" he cried, drawing curious glances. "I know how this goes. We talk and talk and never get around to it."
"I'm in," said Patrick. "This sounds like one to tell the grandkids. Besides, I want to see how this sheepshagger performs with rod and line."
"You'll be needing a native guide, then, Bwana," said Rowen, provoking Hudson into his best Great White Hunter pose. He'd have done better if he hadn't dropped his cigarette out of his mouth and down his shirtfront.
"Bugger," I said. "Well, we'll finish our pints first, eh?"
You might not know this, but there's twenty minutes of drinking-up time after closing time. We were all double-parked, Sheila having heard last orders and got another round in before the bar shut. Result: three lads and a tattooed lady weightlifter trying to choke down a pint and a half before the bouncers heaved us into the street.
It's the cause of more trouble in Britain than anything else. You walk out of a nice warm pub into the cold night air, the entire alcoholic content of a pint or two of beer hitting you all at once. You're bound to be a bit touchy, right?
But we were on a mission, so we walked right past the minor skirmishes-promising ones, at that, that looked like the makings of a nice little riot-not even stopping to spectate.
Well, the only one of us with tackle handy was Bobby. He had digs just down the road in Kennington. Mine was packed away in my parents' house, two hundred miles away. Patrick's was on the other side of the planet, likewise. Rowen’s was on the far side of Peckham, and passing through that neighbourhood twice in one night was more weirdness than any of us wanted to handle.
Reaching Bobby's place, we waited perhaps four seconds-out of decency-after he vanished in back somewhere to root out his tackle before raiding his beer supply and sticking the video on.
Hudson's video collection deserves mention. It consisted entirely of a subcritical mass of football and pornography. The football was a comprehensive collection of classic games and highlights tapes. Standard stuff, if present in unusual quantity. The porn was, in contrast, off the map.
There are conventions in grumbleflicks, for crying out loud. Cheesy dialogue. Improbable situations. Outlandish facial hair. Strange background music that sounds like it's being played on a 19.99 Casiotone keyboard. Not for Hudson: he collected the downright odd. The one that sticks in my memory was what is arguably the strangest pornographic film ever made: The Naked Orchestra. Fifteen or so nude women, equipped with instruments, miming (badly) to some minor item from the classics for about half an hour in soft focus while the camera pans and zooms around. There are few things one can do to make a naked woman into a faintly ridiculous and frankly unappealing sight. Making her play a tuba is one of them.
None of us was in any condition to appreciate the brain-bending qualities of Hudson's collection of naughties, so after brief debate, Patrick got up and picked out the old standby.
"I give you the most violent match ever played in the domestic professional game,” he said, “the Leeds-Arsenal cup final of 1976. The highlights tape: all the goals and fouls. In short, the whole game."
Truth was spoken: it had been a first-class needle match. Jackie Charlton publicly threatened two players on the Arsenal side before the match. A recent experiment to apply modern standards of refereeing concluded that the game would have finished with nine of twenty-two players sent off and all but one of the rest on yellow cards.
In the actual game only one yellow card was given, for playing like a great soft fairy. Ah, it was a hard game in those days. My grandad, God rest his brain (his body, foul temper and vitriolic wit live on yet) reckons letting women into football grounds ruined the game by civilizing it. I’d have subscribed to the theory myself, had I not made Sheila Rowen’s acquaintance.
Be that as it may, come scarce twenty minutes into the first half, we were rudely interrupted. It was Hudson, returned from girding his loins. "Come on, we've a fish to catch."
"Fuckin' 'ell" said Rowen, in hushed and wondering tones.
"'Strewth," said Welch, lapsing into antipodean clich that ordinarily he eschewed.
I let go with a quaint northern idiom or two.
And well might we have eructated our surprise. For Hudson had donned an aspect of such potent piscatorial valor that anyone might have sworn at the sight.
He had the lot. Hat with flies in it, waistcoat with dozens of bulging pockets, stout waterproof trews, heavy-duty green wellies, tackle box bigger than he was, the lot. The effect was somewhat marred by the "Brits on the Piss" T-shirt, but that was all. (Said shirt depicts an anthropomorphic bulldog with a pint of lager and… but ethnic stereotypes need no aid from me.)
"To Wandsworth!" cried Bobby.
"How are we getting there?" asked Patrick.
"Tube stopped ten minutes ago," I ventured, hoping to induce sense by dashing hope of transport. There was no chance of a taxi south of the river at that hour, so no need to mention it.
"No night bus where we want to go," added Sheila. She was perhaps having second thoughts. Or, at least, thoughts of practicing the Drinker's Transcendence, Becoming One with the Sofa. Like becoming One with the Cosmos, but without so much effort or sense of ambition.
"No problem," said Hudson. "I phoned for a minicab."
And I thought I'd shuddered before.
Let me explain, briefly, the institution of the Lon�
�don Minicab, by reference to ancient legends of vampires and werewolves and the strangeness that happens at the witching hour.
The traveler wishing to proceed about the great metropolis that is London has a number of options. He can drive his own car at an average of three (3) miles per hour while being financially sodomised by parking and congestion charges.
Or you can take the tube. The tube's a masterpiece of mid-Victorian mass transit technology and, apart from looking in parts like a set for the far-future scenes in Terminator, is a convenient way to get about. But it shuts down at one in the morning.
Then there are the buses; all the disadvantages of the underground and of road transport, and none of the convenience of either.
Nightbuses are another phenomenon. I'm convinced that the N144 Nightbus out to Clapham is the single rummest and most uncanny form of transport known to man. I got on one night in a nun's habit-long story you really won't care to hear-and still wasn't the oddest-looking customer. (The prize went to a stout party in a wetsuit).
Now, we could have taken the nightbus and walked on, but… but…
There are limits in these matters. Actual exertion was beyond them. We were prepared to risk a minicab. Even after initial horrors, I realized we had no choice.
It's like this: you can't call your conveyance a taxi in London unless it's a proper Black Cab driven by an overweight opinionated loudmouth with bad dress sense who happens to have taken an examination in London geography so's he can pad the meter all the better by taking elaborate "short cuts" that happen to…
I'll stop foaming and get on with it.
This is why private hire cars other than Black Cabs are referred to as minicabs. How the name got going, I dunno. I don't care, either.
Jim Baen’s Universe Page 56