Drew loved to fish, any kind of angling he was prepared to try. Coarse fishing occupied a lot of his spare time and he'd enjoyed a few holidays in Scotland over the years, hunting wild salmon and trout with a fly on a gossamer line, but his real love was sea fishing.
His uncle John introduced him to the pastime when he was a kid. Drew lost his dad to emphysema when he was very young and inherited a string of temporary uncles, few of whom bothered to give a snotty-nosed Drew the time of day. Uncle John wasn't around for long but he took him fishing for carp at a flooded quarry a couple of times and, in that old cliché, Drew was hooked.
Losing his dad to an occupational disease put Drew off coal mining, so when he came to choose a career, he sold insurance, mostly life, health and investment plans. Drew didn't break any industry records but he did all right. The business had changed wholesale since he started, most of it done over the phone nowadays but at the beginning he was put out there doing a lot of door-to-door leg work. He wasn't a bad-looking kid, he looked after himself, dressed smartly for the job, so he got a lot of offers from bored housewives but he turned them all down. He didn't consider himself a prude, he was as randy as the next man, but these desperate housewives reminded him too much of his poor Mum.
Drew's mum had been lonely, desperate for love. She considered herself too young and pretty to be a widow hampered by two young kids, Drew's sister Alice is two years older. Drew's mum had to settle for short relationships, too much alcoholic drink and, Drew suspected, occasional recreational drugs. As a consequence of his Mum's desperation for affection and seeking attention elsewhere, there wasn't much time or love left over for the children, and both siblings found it difficult to establish lasting relationships themselves.
Drew didn't blame Mum for his crappy childhood, they were just the hands that both of them were dealt; three duff hands if he included his sister. Both Drew and his sister Alice were still single, now well into their thirties, and both of them cold fish when it came to lasting romance. Drew only seemed to love cold fish.
That's why he cultivated his friendship with his best friend Alan when they were about ten years old. Alan's dad had a little boat moored up in an estuary about twenty miles from their mining village and, by palling up with Alan, Drew wangled a few fishing trips each summer.
Drew broke off the friendship briefly when they were both 15 and Alan started courting Janice, a girl Drew was rather sweet on but much too shy to ask out.
After a couple of months Drew realised how much he missed Alan, even more than he missed the sea fishing, they really turned out to be good friends, after all. So, he approached Alan and Janice straight after school, shook Alan's hand and asked if they could be friends again, and Alan had embraced him without embarrassment in front of everyone. Then Janice kissed and told him that Alan had been really miserable without his best friend to bounce off.
Drew didn't tell either of them exactly how he felt about Janice at the time, he would have been far too embarrassed, but that didn't stop him telling everyone at their wedding reception eight years later, through the hilarious medium of the best man's speech, the full story of how he loved them both and always would.
Apparently, everyone knew already, had always known, but it did Drew good to clear the air. Janice kissed him gently when it was his turn to dance with the bride, assuring him that the couple would both always love him as the very best of theirbfriends. He was later godfather to both their kids and now they had a third one on the way.
Janice kept trying to fix Drew up with her own friends with little success. The last few years they had almost exclusively been divorced or single mothers. He smiled at the recollection. No, if he was going to fall in love it was going to have to be someone very special, unfortunately Janice had set the bar way too high.
Alan was on board the boat, of course, it was now partly at least his boat. His dad had lasted longer than most, but you don't get many old miners draining the pension fund for long. Alan didn't seem to spend much time fishing on this particular trip and the previous one. He was busy tinkering with the blasted engine again, ensuring he got it going again before the tide turned, in time to take them home. It had taken forever to get to the fishing grounds as it was.
Alan had gone down the mine like his father, from his sixteenth birthday, but the mine had been shut for over ten years now and he was currently employed as a forklift driver at an out-of-town supermarket. He needed to take the boat that he shared with his three brothers out on his turn every four weeks with a guest or three prepared to chip in for the beer, sandwiches, bait, gas and mooring fees to make the boat pay for itself. Today, Alan's brother-in-law Jack and a friend Andy from work were invited but each had cried off at the last minute for one reason or another.
Drew knew the score, and insisted Alan took fifty instead of the usual twenty. Alan knew the score too, and accepted the crisp folded notes without objection or argument, the bond between them so strong.
Drew hollered down the engine hatch, "Time for a beer break, Al!"
Alan poked his head, with one cheek streaked with grease, through the engine room opening, just as Drew closed up the cool box. He smoothly caught the tossed can.
"Cheers!" laughed Drew.
"Likewise," grinned Alan. He clambered out and joined his crew-mate sat on a bench next to the half-dozen rods trailing their lifeless hooks and lines behind and to the side of the boat.
"Wow!" exclaimed Alan, looking around. "What a lovely day."
Just a few puffy clouds punctuated the azure sky, a light swell barely disturbing the quiet water all around them.
"You should be up here enjoying the trip, not messing about with that engine. Get that spare one put in that Pat keeps offering you."
"We can't afford it, Drew, you know that, especially with the baby coming."
Drew knew the situation and wished he could help. He was working on it, actually. Old Pat down at the ships' chandlers was a shrewd old sea dog, he knew the dilemma that was faced by the owners of the boat and had come up with a solution that Drew was still mulling over. Alan and his brothers couldn't afford to replace the engine but Drew could. The engine would cost half the value of the boat, so if he had a mind to he could probably negotiate a half share in the boat without the brothers having to fork out the capital investment. The difficulty then was with the running costs, which made it such a delicate matter. With the four brothers having equal shares, they could each take the boat out once a month, with two or three paying guests at a time and break even. With a fifth wheel, even if he just took the one turn every five weeks instead of every second week, the balance would shift and the brothers would eventually be unable to maintain their share and have to drop out. That would end Drew's friendly relationship with Alan's brothers and probably damage his best friendship with Alan. A prickly problem, no easy solution.
