by Cynan Jones
He was handed a glass and took a big, long drink. “We have to keep moving forward,” thought Grzegorz. “We think we have no choice. But this is the land of choice. We can’t just blame the situation all the time. We have to take the next step.” He looked for his wife. She had gone from the room. The baby was still with the old woman.
In the first mild blur of alcohol the hard edges of his worry smoothed off. “Did I make all the wrong choices?” he thought. “We couldn’t have stayed though. We could never have stayed.” He held his new son and drank, his older boy withdrawn and strangely displaced, confused by the placatory attention people were showing him, pointing at the new baby. They were talking to him. “You have to say ‘brother’ here. You can’t call him your brat like in Poland. It means something else here.” They laughed. “Learn to call him your brother. You’re not in Poland now!” He didn’t understand; besides, the activity in the kitchen startled the boy. He was always withdrawn, self-contained. Grzegorz watched him and thought back to the boy’s first birthday.
They’d put him down on the carpeted floor and round him set out the traditional things. A book, a banknote, his wife’s sister’s rosary, and a vodka glass, the kieliszek, all spread out equally from the child. Then they waited, tongue in cheek but with that strange whisper of conviction superstitions can have, to see what he reached for first. Whether he would be, in his future, an intellectual, a businessman, a priest, or a drunk. Of course, it’s possible to be all of them at once, his friend had said. That had made them laugh. You just need four hands! His son had reached for the book. “That’s not a good sign,” thought Grzegorz. He felt inadequate. Grzegorz felt it immediately as something he would not be able to help with.
The women were rolling out the dough for the pierogi, the small stuffed dumplings, cutting out circles with a glass and dropping in the fillings then folding them and pinching them closed. Some of the other children were helping and there was a long row of parcels starting to line up.
The women took the ducks and drained the blood off into cups and the air stank as they burned the last fine feathers off the duck on the gas ring and the kitchen filled with an acrid tang. Still the boy stared. Grzegorz watched the skins tauten in the flame and the buds of down char and desiccate and the women’s fat, soft hands brush them off. He looked down at his new little son, at the delicate red ribbon, then at his older boy who stood watching while the other children ran round catching the plucked feathers that inevitably escaped and floated round in the crowded light of the kitchen.
The boy stared. Grzegorz thought his son must have some faint memory of the big farm table, the low ceiling. Of the warm, milky smell of the soft old woman that was being blurred in his mind amongst the matrons of this house, that was turning into nothing more than a suspicion he once knew someone special. Poland would be a strange thing to him, a distant awareness that would perhaps fade and become nothing more than a historical fact as he grew. With all the Polish around him, nothing had really changed. But there was no place of focus for the boy now, and, looking at him, Grzegorz felt the boy would always carry this sense of having been removed from something and that he would never understand it.
He nodded as one of the women lifted the boy and stood him on a chair where he held on to the unit alongside her, staring at the process of the ducks, surrounded by the noise and festivity. The boy watched the women pour the white vinegar into the blood to stop it clotting, twitched his nose with the sharp smell of it, and poked his finger curiously into the blood. Then he watched as one of the men took the big abattoir knife from his bag and cut up the ducks, now these strange, naked, riddled creatures, and quartered them onto the board.
Grzegorz took up his new son and went out. The house was always crowded and small but it seemed to close in on him. He seemed to be carrying too many confusing emotions, and just didn’t know how to feel. It was like he couldn’t settle on one feeling. This was all new. He thought of the wide eyes of the boy watching the ducks being quartered. There was no resting place of family, of places he knew. There had been for the first boy, and he had taken him from them. Now, he had to get it right for them both.
Grzegorz was still partly stunned. He had thought the hospitals here would be so much better than at home, but he was horrified. The machines here were newer, the buildings better kept. But he’d suffered this unshakeable feeling that they were being herded like cattle, going through this numerical process. There didn’t seem to be any doctors about, any nurses. Not like when his first son was born. At least there had been people to help, always. And he knew the score. They’d saved what złotys they could and when they went into the hospital paid off the right people, so the care and concern they got was good and consistent. You got what you paid for. But here there had been an impersonal thing he couldn’t get used to. He was horrified by the farm-like ward, had tried to pay a nurse to get his wife a room, anywhere, just some place they could be away from people for a while, for the first few hours of his new baby’s life, before going back into the house. The nurse had just looked at him bewildered, and he didn’t have the English to explain.
He lay down in the women’s room with his wife. She was tired, brittle looking. From the women’s room, they smelled the stock making in the kitchen below, heard the simmering of the building celebration. People stayed away to give them time. They were thankful for that. There were people in the hospital, there were people here. They just wanted space together to take in this massive new thing.
Grzegorz looked down at the exquisite new thing of his son and felt this strange and terrible pride. The boy threw out his arms and cried. From somewhere, Grzegorz had the illusion of Christmas as the cloves and the allspice lifted through the room and the smell of the stock grew. He saw the ducks clearly in his grandfather’s hand, the long, low marsh. Remembered exactly the precious tin his grandmother kept the spices in. The boy cried feebly and his wife put him to her breast. “The things we need are very simple,” thought Grzegorz. “I want to have the things we need for them.”
Hold worked inshore the strings of prawn pots, bringing up the creels with the pot haul and letting the boat idle, anchored some by the weight of the string in the water. He was a few hundred meters off the shore and the sun had come round enough to light up the beach and it looked beautiful, and he thought there was something more determined in the way the coast looked in the colder months.
Much of the prawn fishing was done in these colder months and he emptied the prawns into the drum and they flicked and clicked and there was no rhyme or reason to why some of the pots had prawns and some none. He knew this very well, that there were no averages, no laws with fishing. He could imagine the prawns nibbling, testing, weighing the pot. Something had to make them want to go in, they had to be encouraged; but once they were in, that was that. They were stuck with the decision.
Hold rebaited the pots that needed it with the scad and herring they had salted down and then he set the boat and played the string back out into the water and there was the comfortable rhythm of the engine and the splash of the creels rhythmically hitting the water.
He went cursorily through the drum and picked out the smallest prawns and threw them over the side, and wondered how they felt for that moment in the totally foreign element of the air; then he lifted some buckets of seawater and filled the drum and banged on the lid. He didn’t believe in the unnecessary suffering of things and saw no purpose to letting the prawns suffocate blithely in the air. That was a very strong thing in Hold: his belief that a thing should not die nor be hurt without purpose. For this reason he didn’t take the lobsters that were only just of size, knowing how slowly they grew, nor did he shoot things that were scarce, the hares and doves, which he seemed to remember seeing all the time as a child but rarely saw now. Though he fished and shot, this was for a purpose, and that he was engineer of the hurt inevitable he felt with great responsibility, and that was a great driving force in him. It gave him a respect for life and for th
e right of things to exist. He felt we had come too far from this.
He played the strings out and then went on to the lobster pots that he had put out for the first time this season. In the first pot there was a big lobster and there was no reason for it on the fresh bait, and in the other pots, their spines stuck with weed and debris, were spider crabs, strangely early and again, for this, without reason to be there. He unloaded the lobster from the pot and put it in a tub, and then took out the spider crabs, their conkery shells crusted with acorn barnacles. He wondered whether the spider crabs being early was from some disturbance, perhaps flushed by the scallop dredgers out at sea, or some sign of unusual warming water. “Ah,” thought Hold. “There just aren’t any rules. Just the rule that the sea will keep surprising you.”
In the kitchen, the boy helped the women throw the spices into the pot and then watched them take the deformed pieces of duck out from the water and shred off the meat, putting the offal to one side on a plate. The boy stared at it with a kind of enamored disgust. “For your mama,” they said. “It will help keep her strong after the baby.”
The boy helped throw the dried fruit into the soup, then they poured in the cups of rich black blood and then gradually the flour, and the boy watched as the soup slowly thickened.
Still there was an illusion of Christmas with the smells that had reached the sleeping room. Grzegorz looked down at the little red ribbon on the child’s wrist. It was unnerving him. He thought it made the baby look as if it wore a price tag, as if somehow he was for sale. Part of him wanted to rip it away, to tear away the idea that there could be anything like an evil eye out there to be protected from. But he didn’t feel he could defy superstition for one moment. It had been built into him too long ago. “It’s not being watched. It’s being kept down,” he thought. “I’ll have to try and make a little more now. We can save more. We can get out of here to a place of our own.”
When the couple came back to the kitchen and saw the boy on the chair helping the women with the soup, Grzegorz almost choked with this cloth of thanks that seemed to cough up out of him from somewhere. He was filled with this great sense that they would make it, that they would get through all of this and be happy soon. That this was just a stop on the way. He reached for his wife’s hand and held it, and for a moment just in this small gesture there was all this renewed hope.
One of the older women handed a plate to his wife and there was something almost religious about the act, as if of some great donation. She looked down at the duck offal.
“It’ll keep you strong,” said the woman. Grzegorz saw the great pride in the woman’s face.
The wave of hope broke and smashed over the stones of the facts. “I’m still in Poland,” thought Grzegorz. Again, the boat of his emotions tipped in the waves. “We can’t move on while there is all of this, we can’t become anything new.” He looked at all the Polish products around the place, sitting in the cooking smells, the familiarity of the sounds. He looked desperately out of the window at the wall opposite with the big graffiti, “Polish out,” but he didn’t register it any more. He wanted to feel better at this incredible time.
“This is where we are now,” he thought. “And we have to move on. Here. Poland has nothing for us.” He wanted so much to change things and to bring all these new things to his life. He was very desperate for that. “I just need a chance,” he thought. He watched his wife eat up the small offal with her fingers, holding their tiny new son. Someone needs to give me a chance.
As he headed back in, Hold took five or six of the fish and laid them on the gunwale. They were medium-sized fish and he held them down on the gunwale and descaled them with the back of the knife, working in little jerking strokes. Then he moved the descaled fish to a board on the gunwale and took off the flesh, working from the head down along the spine then slipping out the rib bones from the severed flanks and putting the fillets into a box. It was a rhythmic and calm process and he moved easily with the boat as it headed in and he could feel the course of the boat just with his body. He had taken bass and codling in the net and it was the bass he filleted.
When he had taken the fillets, he cut out the intestines into a pile. Then he cut off the translucent meat and the flaps of foily skin and cut the heads from the thick spines and threw all of that into one of the bait tubs for the pots. The bass had big heads for their size and this was good bait and lasted a long time in the pots in the water. He did this with a kind of mechanism and it was part of him to invent little rituals and to give himself small lectures.
Above him, a string of gulls had come on, and he flicked off the rich pile of intestines from the gunwale and the gulls dropped into the water after the sinking guts. In amongst the bright-white adults, some of the gulls still had the juvenile plumage they would have until some summers further on. Hold had noticed how the younger gulls had rich brown eyes, with something almost mammalian in them, but that the older gulls’ eyes were cold, yellow, as if something had gone out of them. Some of the adult gulls were so close he could see clearly the red spot on their beak that the chicks would tap to make them regurgitate food, and while he did not care for the yellow eyes, he liked this mechanism in them.
He hauled a bucket of water and washed the scales and the rust-like blood down off the gunwale and cleaned the cutting board and his knife then washed the blood and scales off his hands with the seawater, which was the best way. He could feel a chop starting in the sea that would mean the weather getting up in the next few days, the sea here filling with the beginnings of an energy nascent hundreds of miles away. Some Bahamian storm or seeming emotional reaction to change in pressure days away from here. He could feel that there was great power and swell in the sea, though it was calm out on the water, and the lifting of the waves at the shore had the power of a prowling animal about it, and some male thing, like someone who hopes someone will fight them.
He took a long drink of clean water and cut a sliver off one of the fillets and chewed the virile and strong raw flesh and counted in his head, as he chewed, the likely take from the day’s catch.
He got a percentage of the price of the fish at sale and a flat rate every time he took the boat out. The owner covered all the costs and handled the license and never came out on the boat.
After getting fired from the fish factory, Hold had looked into trying to set up on his own boat, but the sums were simply too big. It was getting started, that was the thing. If you didn’t have anything you just couldn’t start up.
He’d made the right choice with the factory. It would have been worse if Danny had gone. He was always a joker. That kind of thing came with his basic sense of adventure and it wasn’t the first time Hold had taken the fall for him. But Danny had the wife and family. There was a lot of seasonal stuff about, but work wasn’t easy round here. It was better that Hold took the hit.
He gave up the bedsit and moved into the trailer. That suited, with the work they were trying to get done on the house. Cara was furious with Danny for letting Hold take the fall, but what could you do? You couldn’t get that furious with Danny, you never could.
He thought of it and smiled even now. There was an energy and hurry always as they loaded the trays of crabs onto the racks for the blast freezer, a compulsive clonking sound to the cooked pasty-like shells knocking together as they handled the crabs, a fresh baity smell. It was crazy work and it could easily breed a silliness and it was just one of those moments Danny was prone to.
When the guy came out of the blast freezer he was frosted, like he’d been dipped in wet sugar. He could hardly move. Funny as it was, it could have killed him. His apron had been blasted out and stood solid, straight out like a shelf in front of him. That set the men off.
When the supervisor arrived it was pretty inevitable. The guys were still laughing, some of them uncontrollably. It was the apron. They just couldn’t get over that.
“Who was it?”
“It was me,” Hold had said. That was that. But he l
aughed about it even now. “That was Danny,” he thought. “I couldn’t have let him lose his job.”
After that he worked for two years in the cheese factory in the valley, and took the shift work that came with it and the pay, which was good for the area. But it was futile, monotonous work that seemed to be nothing but moving cheese around. Not many people lasted long at it. Work’s work, he had told himself, trying to get through it, setting up little purposes, timescales, the tricks we play on ourselves to get through things. But Danny dying had been a wake-up call, and he just couldn’t do it anymore. He couldn’t pretend that he was going to work there in that way for years and save money then buy a boat that he could take out and make a little money on, fishing or taking out trips. Anything could take you. He knew that now. And he wouldn’t do things he could see no value in or not get something back from. He looked at the knife that his friend had given him and he looked at it still in his hand and smiled at the thought of the apron again. The money he had was not very much. That was that. But he could cope with the things he did to get it.
He could hear the cattle lowing through the walls, this strange muted sound from the sheds where the vets rhythmically checked the animals, seemingly calm and oblivious. From home, Grzegorz knew how the smell would be in there. How the warm, manurey smell of cattle would be different to the sharp, chemical tang around him. There was something low and maternal about the sound to Grzegorz as he stood in the blood-letting bay, something that would not fit against the men in white overalls, the white rubber boots and white helmets, the strange medicalness of that. He was used to the idea of animals as products, but he was trying to adjust to the clinicality of it. Cows were better than sheep though. When the sheep came through there was something more startled to them, a horror in the number. It was more of a cull and the sheep seemed always to sense that with this contagious and wide fear. He’d heard someone say they killed twenty-five thousand sheep a week here. That didn’t seem possible.
