The Levels by Peter Benson

Author:Peter Benson [Benson, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize, first love, coming-of-age, rural, Somerset, countryside
Publisher: Alma Books
Published: 2012-04-02T04:00:00+00:00

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At Thorney Mills there is a silted old pool where teal and eel swim, sheltered by the old building. A cast iron wheel hangs on the wall beneath its eaves; the river Parret, a drain of a river, is a better place than any to catch eels. Like the poet Coleridge, we learnt about eels at school. Nobody knows why they travel over 3000 miles from a sea of weed in the Atlantic Ocean, after breeding with American cousins, to arrive in the Parret at Thorney’s silted pool. There are many ways to cook and many ways to catch eel. Smoked, they are delicious, boiled, poached, baked? Nets, traps, line, rayballing? The river was thick, clotting, perfect weather, two days of sunshine turned muggy, then a series of thunderstorms. Rayballing weather. Eels, four or five years old, swimming in the pool. Their adult eyes, though not fully grown, and their long golden bodies, swivelling through the dark water, feeding before their stomachs wither and they swim, swollen with fat, away and against the currents to the weedy sea again, where they were born, to birth their eggs. In nine months they will be dead, far away. Cunning fish, to live so long and travel so far to somewhere so small without anyone knowing how.

‘Hello?’

‘Billy?’

‘Yes.’

‘I was wondering when you’d call. Happy?’

‘Yes.’

‘Going to ask me out again?’

‘When?’

‘Take me fishing. You know how?’

‘Rayballing?’ I said.

‘Pardon?’

‘Don’t you know what rayballing is?’

‘No. You going to tell me?’

‘I’ll show you.’

We went rayballing one Saturday. The eels never knew we were coming. They swam in their pool, I took a tin bath off the workshop roof, and spent the morning digging.

‘You dig any more of them and there’ll be none left,’ my mother shouted. ‘Worm’s good for it, the gardener’s friend, you know?’

‘You want eel pie?’ That shut her up.

When I had twenty worms, that was enough, little piles of earth round the garden, I put them in a honey barrel. The eels waited. Some of them were so old they had been rayballed before, and escaped; no other method of fishing reduces the odds so much. No daylight penetrated the pool. An eel could not see its own tail. It smelt for other fish, cruised at them with a fleshy purpose. I walked to Drove House. The van had been misfiring. I didn’t blame it. I walked through the orchard, Muriel’s mother was sat painting.

‘Morning!’ I said. She jumped, and made an odd noise.

‘Hello Billy, making me jump!’ she said.

‘Sorry,’ I looked at the painting. The canvas was covered with thin lines of green and brown paint beneath a big washy block of blue.

‘The light’s so good,’ she said. I looked at it, it didn’t seem different from any other. ‘Do you paint?’ she asked. I didn’t. ‘Oh it frees me! Out in the open, give me a paint box, clean canvas, my dear, a morning like this, I’m in my seventh—Listen.’ She cocked an ear. ‘I wish I could capture it, in paint.’ What? I didn’t know what she was on about.

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