Saturday Morning

By Friday afternoon Dominic had stopped making faces at Jamie across the classroom when Suki was not looking and started looking smug instead, which was worse. Jamie chose to ignore both expressions equally.

It rained on Friday night and stopped just before dawn and Saturday morning arrived clean and cold and bright, the canal path sparkling with wet and the water very still in the early light.

His uncle Marcus was already there when Jamie arrived, sitting on his folding chair with a flask of tea, the spare rod set up and leaning against the bank. He looked at Jamie and then at the path behind him.

"She is coming," Jamie said, before his uncle could say anything. "Stop making that face."

"I am not making a face," his uncle said, making a face.

Suki arrived seven minutes later, slightly out of breath, a scarf around her neck in a colour that Jamie's brain registered as making her look nice before he could tell it to stop doing that. She took in the canal and the still water and the low morning mist sitting above the far bank and stopped walking for a moment.

"Oh," she said quietly. Not to anyone in particular. Just to the morning.

"Good, right?" Jamie said.

She looked at him. Her cheeks were pink from the cold and she was smiling properly for the first time since he had met her, a full smile, not the careful corner-of-the-mouth one from the library but something wider and less guarded.

"Good," she said.

His uncle showed her the rod and she took it with the ease of someone who had done this before, checking the line, adjusting the grip, settling into her chair with a naturalness that made his uncle nod approvingly.

"You have fished before," his uncle said.

"Since I was five," Suki said. "My dad taught me."

"Bristol girl?"

"Was," she said. The word sat in the air for a moment. "Here now."

"Here is not bad," his uncle said. "Give it time."

Suki looked at the water. "I am starting to think so," she said.

She did not look at Jamie when she said it. But Jamie was sitting close enough that he felt the words land differently than they would have landed on someone standing further away.

They fished for two hours. Suki caught a roach in the first forty minutes, which his uncle said was a good sign for the morning and which made her look quietly pleased in a way she tried not to show and did not entirely succeed at. Jamie caught nothing, which he had expected and which did not bother him at all because he had not come for the fishing.

His uncle packed up slowly and winked at Jamie when Suki was not looking, which Jamie chose to completely ignore.

On the walk back to the bus stop she fell into step beside him, not quite as far apart as they had been walking before.

"Thank you," she said. "For organising it."

"My uncle did most of it," Jamie said.

"You asked him," she said. "You looked up the fish. You remembered that I said I missed it." She paused. "You did not have to do any of that."

Jamie looked at the path ahead. The morning was warming up now, the mist gone, the canal glinting behind them.

"I wanted to," he said. Simply, because it was simply true.

Suki was quiet for a moment. Then she said: "We should come back. Next Saturday."

"Yes," Jamie said. He kept his voice normal. Inside his chest something was doing something warm and slightly chaotic that he decided not to examine too closely for now.

"And maybe you will catch something this time," she said.

"Maybe," he said. "Though honestly I am not that bothered about the fish."

Suki looked at him with the steady reading look she had. Then she looked back at the path, but she was smiling. The full one.

"I know," she said. "I noticed."

The bus came after four minutes. They sat on the top deck because Suki said she always sat on the top deck when she was somewhere new so she could see more of the town. Jamie had never thought about doing that before but he looked out of the window the whole way and saw the streets differently, rooftops and chimney pots and the high green strip of the park from above.

They walked to the bus stop together in the bright cold morning, close enough that their arms brushed once and neither of them moved away.

He thought about the canal on the bus home. He thought about the way she had said here now, not quite sad, not quite settled, somewhere in between. He thought about the full smile.

When he got home his mum asked how his Saturday had been.

"Good," he said. "Really good actually."

She looked at him the way his uncle had looked at him. He ignored it the same way.

***The End***