Fetching Dylan by Stephen Foster

Author:Stephen Foster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Epic

Though, in a sense, it was possible to predict the epic, it was, in an equal sense, impossible to predict it, too. It took place on a Tuesday evening. On the Saturday before—just three nights earlier—we had had a quiet hour up at the beach, more or less incident-free. Prior to this Saturday walk I had sat in the car anxiously awaiting the final soccer scores. It was the sixth-last game of the season: Stoke had drawn away to Sheffield on Wednesday, which left us in the second automatic promotion place. This was completely uncharted water; we had not been in the top flight for twenty-three years and now we were only five matches away from it. I thought about it a lot on the walk; I had awkward and compromised emotions to deal with because I had developed a deep loathing for the manager who was about to achieve this miracle. He was a long-ball merchant who was one-dimensional in every regard. Watching the type of game he served up was a complete waste of my time: there was more aesthetic beauty in a minute of Dylan’s running than in a season of Pulis’s games. But: this year it was beginning to look as though his tactics might possibly bear fruit in the form of promotion. I had to separate my personal feelings of animosity for Pulis from my lifelong support of my hometown team. I walked along alternately grinding my teeth and dreaming of the happy future where our team had made it to the EPL. After the walk I drove home and then took a dish of sea bass around to friends for dinner, with fish purchased earlier in the day from my new favorite fishmongers. The reason their crab was twice the price of the crab that I had been buying from the van at the side of the road, they told me, was that they dressed their own, whereas the van man most likely didn’t (now that we had established a full relationship, and Dylan had cod cheeks sent out for him on a regular basis, I was privy to all sorts of inside information). The fishmonger himself pulled the claws back from a crab and showed me. All that would contain once he had dressed it was what I was looking at now, see, meat that had originally come from this very shell, unlike the cheaper varieties where every bit of flesh is mechanically recovered and only a little white meat ends up in each of the “shells,” which are not shells but are made out of plastic and which are smaller. There’s a factory where this takes place, up near the coast, where they buy everything from the catch and chuck it all into the machines: crabs with only one claw, a couple of stray prawns, whatever they find. That is what you end up with on your plate, unlike in this establishment where everything is premium, or at least as premium as is possible in this day and age.

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