Everything I Found on the Beach

by Cynan Jones

  “I could change it, if I had just one chance,” he thought. “If just one chance came along.” He watched the cat eat the fillet, half bolt it, the way the opportunist has to take his chance. He felt this great draw, this need to go to them, and he knew that taking the fillets was just yet another excuse, but there was a magnetism working, as if he was sucked into the great void of his friend at this time. It was like he felt the need to apologize for his failure to keep the house, but could not find the words. In this sudden failure there was some sort of need to be close to them, as if he wanted some sort of forgiveness from Danny.

  “I’ll take the fillets along,” he thought. “I’ll put out the shore nets. I could do with the space of the beach.”

  The baby was being fed when the row broke out and he started to scream immediately when their voices went up and the other boy, too, started to cry. Started to cry just with the sheer completeness of everyone’s upset, his baby brother wailing, his mother covering herself angrily and reddening and launching into one of those shapeless female arguments that is just a letting go of all the exhausting little frustrations. And his father just emitting this great, weary uselessness at everything, as if it all fell on him, looking like he was taking in her words like they were something foul he had in his mouth and was deciding on whether to spit up.

  They can be vicious in argument, women, and she sliced into him over and over, and all his weaknesses that he had offered up to her, in some great amnesty of masculinity, that he had offered her as signs of his true scale as nothing more than a simple man, she sliced at and tore into. And his children yelled, as if they watched this flaying of their father.

  He had not seen her like this before. He realized they had never really argued, and all of this was pouring out of her. She even looked ugly to him, the way she was then.

  “You promised things,” she said. “I left everything behind. You promised we would have things.”

  He felt all the weight of that.

  “You promised things.”

  He knocked and came in through the porch, taking off his shoes, and went through to the kitchen and put the fillets in their newspaper down on the side and she met him in almost a sedate way. When Hold had been on the sea, he smelled of Danny to her and it was difficult for her not to react at that so she quite often had this distant thing about her. She was just making tea and fetched down another cup automatically and put in a teabag and poured on the still boiled water from the kettle that puffed steam up into the underside of the hanging unit. Then she took up her own cup and held it and blew over it and looked at the parcel on the worktop.

  “Present,” said Hold.

  Cara took out the teabag and squeezed it against the side of the cup and lifted it out to the little plastic food tray she had for compost to throw on the border. She bent for the milk from the fridge and he watched deliberately, instead, the steam come off the teabag and curl up amongst the broken eggshells and peelings there like some far away sign. Like the engine smoking across the top of the boat.

  She put in the milk and passed him the cup and he looked down at the fillets on the side, looking at the newspaper they were wrapped in, the black print furring out from itself, leaving some chromatogram-like aura around the words.

  “Bass,” he said, and she nodded. Her sleeves were rolled up, like she’d been doing kitchen work and hadn’t had time to change her clothes. Hold looked at the way she was dressed in the respectable clothes and said, “How was the bank?”

  She gave the slightest shake of her head.

  He put the tea down and opened a cupboard, mainly so she couldn’t see the flash of anger on his face.

  “How was the sea today?” she said to him. He was going through the cupboards like the house was his own.

  “She’s getting up. Not so soon, though. Be a few days.”

  “Thanks for the fish.”

  “It’s good fish,” he said. He was thinking of the house, and how he had promised Danny he would have it for the boy. “Where’s he at?”

  “He’s out on his bike.” There was a moment of space. They both noticed at the same time and were uncomfortable with it.

  “Are you looking for biscuits?”

  “It’s fine.”

  She looked apologetic that there were no biscuits. Like she had let him down. There was no play. None of the bantered flirting there used to be, while Danny was still with her; none of the soft edgemanship they both harmlessly enjoyed, like dogs chasing the same ball in a park. None of what was just gentle rhythmic chemistry, a safe peacefulness to it when Danny was alive and could watch it, and valued it in some way as this great reassurance of his choice in her that his friend could have this intentless thing with her.

  He looked down at the sore welling on his thumb. It was one of those small things. He picked at it.

  “Do you have a needle?” he asked.

  Cara took his hand and looked at it. “It’s not ready yet. You’ll just dig into yourself. Leave it. It will lift.”

  Hold nodded at her.

  “You should let me take him out soon,” he said.

  And she nearly called him Danny but then she said, “Holden, he’s too young. And it’s a school night.”

  They sipped their tea awhile.

  “You’ve got the nets out?”

  “I’ve just set them.”

  He had gone from the quay and driven over to the beach and taken the net over his shoulder out along the shore in the tough old spoil bag. It made sense if he was coming for rabbits on the cliff that night to have some point to aim for and work down to, but more than this physical excuse it was that something went from him on the beach.

  Danny’s death had become a great thing, and a point of time from which all things seemed to be measured. Hold felt very strongly the responsibility to create some new point for things to come from, some positive beginning point like the birth of a child to a couple. He had a vision of them all sitting on a bench in the sunshine outside the finished house. He felt as if he needed some sign to have that purpose. He felt greatly that a renewed energy was needed, and that perhaps from this positive thing, in this good momentum, it would not be the betrayal to go with her as it would be from hurt, in this space of damage. If it grew out of something good and new they had built for themselves and wasn’t simply them falling into the space that Danny’s death had created.

  The bass hunt side to side, zigzagging for things disturbed along the breaking lip of the inward tide, so the gill net is laid across the beach, right-angled to the sea over the uncovered pools to catch them as they follow the water in. Once they choose a course, if the net is there, they hit it.

  In the rushing water, the nylon would be invisible to the fish and Hold could imagine them striking the net, that first moment of bloody confusion and the increased power to swim on, driving them further into the mesh, the scales shed in the water, the line fitting fatally behind their gills. He pushed the thought away.

  As he had left the beach the sun was starting to bleed out into the evening. The warmth hadn’t come into things yet and he knew it would be a cool night. Again, the peregrine had come off the cliffs and for a while circled over him as he lay the net, in witness, the hunter come to watch the hunter. There was a real definition to the thing against the thinning evening light.

  “You should come out again. You and Jake.”

  And he remembered then, in full detail, her shoulders, bare, the thin open shirt licking out in the wind, the surprise freckles on her shoulders seeming to flush then merge under the sun, like drops of something onto clean cloth; and Danny drove the boat head on to the waves and got her jumping, with the childishness over her face at the enjoyment of it; and Danny, so proud. And it seemed like Hold had only understood that word proud then for the first time. That pride in his friend. And Hold knew that he would have a care for this girl that was like that close care for a friend’s child, and that she was partly his to look after.

  And she remembered
him. This friend of Danny’s with his strange-meaning name. How he was more methodical and quiet than Danny, and less flashy. And how he brought up the fish, and helped her with the rod when she caught her first string of mackerel and they came wheeling and flapping into the boat and she was screaming and laughing and seeing the broad, proud smile of her man. But how Hold had taken the rod without taking it off her and brought in the line and flicked off the mackerel with some calm respect and sense of his own place that she felt this richness of, as Danny steered the boat idling through the water. And she had felt from this man she was meeting for the first time great patience and great solidity and some great power of decision that made her feel very safe around him, as if she knew he would never alter his mind about her. And it made her love Danny more, that he had a friend like this.

  And that same image had balled at them, then, in that one phrase he had said. That she should come out. And they had understood, together, that at all costs there must be no private space. Not to walk too close to the edge of the cliff.

  “Will you do the window for me?” she asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “You think it was kids?”

  She nodded. She felt the need to explain. “I still can’t go in there.”

  “It’s fine,” he said.

  He went into the shed and put the padlock with the key still in it down on the shelf by the broken window. Glass had gone over the shelf and onto the floor and Holden could see the tarmac-covered chipping that had come through the window.

  Dust was on the other window panels and looked scaly in the last of the sun. At the window corners the sun caught in the spiderwebs, vaguely bluish.

  Hold picked up the chipping and threw it from the door and brushed off the glass splinters from the window shelf.

  He could feel Danny’s presence here. Or the absence of him that he could usually avoid.

  The dust had settled quickly over the place. “I know how it will go. She will do her best to carry on, to stay positive. But this will come down on her, this dust. This tiredness and lack of use. And then she’ll be dry and worn out and beaten.” He felt great pain at knowing this with such certainty.

  “I should have been firmer,” he said to himself. “I should have insisted he got it checked out. The one time I didn’t push, that I took a step back. It was part of his character too,” thought Hold. “To bury his head in the sand. Not face responsibility. But he should have got it looked at. I should have pushed him harder.”

  He tipped one tub of screws into another to empty a tub and put into it the broken glass and squatted and picked up the larger fragments from the floor.

  The rods and tools were around the walls.

  He went through a pile of wood and picked out some hardboard and took down a saw from a nail and found in the rack of small tools a measuring tape.

  He cut the piece to the size of the window panel, measuring with the rusted tape and marking his measures with a nail, and he set the cut piece into the hole and pinned it up.

  “This is not good, us both like this,” he said, and pushed that out from his mind. “This?” he asked himself. “There isn’t a this.”

  He gave one of the uprights an absent push, as if to see that the shed had solidity, and perhaps in some way in that act he was testing his own strength.

  I wonder if Jake comes in here. I wonder if he comes in here to his father’s things. I wonder if he remembers. I wonder if he knows where the key is and comes secretly in here and feels okay.

  Hold looked at the things. Such strange refuse we leave. In the corner, the hexagons of an old wasps’ nest, husks of paper.

  He looked at the old bait fridge, all pitted and measled with rust, and looked in it and seeing it empty found the plug and unplugged it.

  He picked up the old metal detector and switched it on to see if it worked and waved it about and it sang shrilly at the metal but it was somehow as if it was Danny the machine detected.

  “Hey, Danny,” he said. And there was thirty years in it, and all the three years of his absence.

  He took the metal detector with him, and locked up the shed.

  “Why don’t you stay for supper?” she said.

  “I have the nets out.”

  “Doesn’t stop you eating supper,” Cara said.

  “Are you shooting tonight?” asked the kid.

  “No, Jake,” said his mother, not as the answer, just to stop him before he started. But he had his father’s irresistible capacity.

  “Yeah, I’m shooting tonight.”

  He felt Cara look at him. “It won’t be such a good night,” he said to put the boy off. “Too much moon. That’s good for the nets though.” He was trying to feed the boy little knowledges always. “Something draws them. I don’t know what it is. But something draws them up in that moon.”

  The kid was looking at him. He was ignoring the mysterious thing Hold was doing. “Why isn’t it good for shooting?” It was all about the gun. It was like he didn’t want to know about the fish.

  “If you’re staying, that’s it with the talk,” Cara said.

  They took the tripe home in a black bin sack. On the women’s orders they took it into the garden and hung it like some great shroud and then washed the clinging gouts of cud and the stomach liquids off then they carried it inside like some foul painter’s sheet and butchered it up on the table.

  The place stank for weeks with the intestinal, unmistakable odor of the tripe cooking but it was good solid food. It had this strange effect on the house, like the bringing home of a big fish, and Grzegorz felt a type of pride. All the time, they brought back what they could without morally resorting in their minds to stealing. It was just the leftover stuff, the things gone to waste, the heavy, clubby bones of beef that they put into the flaczki, the rich tripe soup.

  There was the odor, though, the odor that stuck about the house as if it had crept into the fabrics of the place and mixed up with the sharp permanent smell of the vinegar from always pickling vegetables, the smells of the habit of storage, of having to make it through winter. To Grzegorz, it was the smell of poorness, of home. Of the leaden humbleness of his grandparents. Of his own naivety to think that he could live that way, with that little, in the world as it was now.

  He thought of the farm. “It would not be possible,” he thought. “We’ve seen other things now, we want other things. It would never have been possible to stay there.”

  One by one the tiny farms, most of them less than ten acres, had folded in. At first, it was like watching candles guttering out; but then, with the big European supermarkets moving into the town suburbs with their cheaper prices, the farms just seemed to be snuffed, one by one, by this unbeatable instrument of economy wielded at arm’s length. “We are a poor people, we have to buy the cheapest,” thought Grzegorz. “You couldn’t expect people to fight them.” He thought bitterly of the old timber house, the warm, sweet smell of animals, the constant smell of food cooking, like now, food with this lingering odor.

  The government was trying to force the farms to consolidate, trying to ball them all up and remold them into bigger, more competitive units so it could feasibly ask for European grants. But the people involved were balled up in the wax of these policies. Now the foreigners were coming in and buying up vast tracts of land that cost them next to nothing, turning them into holiday resorts and golf courses. “We could never have stayed,” he told himself. These farms, some two million or so of them, had survived the Russians, the Germans, and Communism but could not beat this simple mathematical annihilation, this new invasion of wealthy outsiders. He knew in his heart, with a stench of guilt, that they could never have taken on the farm anyway, that it was an illusion, that it was better the choice had been crushed.

  “We want more now,” said Grzegorz. “We’re not so simple. We can’t be happy living the old way any more. It is better to be here. Poland can rot.”

  On the stove, the tripe boiled, and the stench went through the house.
/>   He watched her cook. She had the apron on and doubled at the waist with the cord around it and her collar stayed off her shoulders and he saw the surprise freckles there, starting just on her shoulders. He stopped himself. He had fantasized about her a lot when Danny was alive but after he died had stopped himself, refused to let himself, as if it was some kind of bigger betrayal.

  He was drinking one of the beers she always kept in the fridge for him and could hear in the next room Jake going round with the metal detector finding the metal things he had hidden about.

  He watched Cara put the fillets into the butter in the pan and they arched slightly as the skin burned, and relaxed again. She levered them over and he looked at the beautiful netted skin of the fish, emphasized in its burning.

  She stooped down and opened the oven and flicked her hair over her ear and with the oven gloves shook up the tray of oven chips and turned the tray of the loose chips round and slid it back in and shut the oven again. When she turned the fish over once more the meat was bright white.

  Hold went through and helped Jake clear up the metal things all around and ready the table and she brought the plates through with the fish on and put the chips and the peas on the table. Looking at the fish, Hold had this bizarre thing that it was some white affinity that drew the fish to the moon. A sense of light.

  The metal detector was in the corner and needed to be cleaned up after all the time in the shed and Hold decided he would take it and clean it.

  He remembered the time Danny had hidden things about the garden for the boy, all sorts of metal objects, planting them under stones, burying them at the foot of the hedgerow. The way Danny could bring a sense of adventure into something.

  The boy was younger then and every time he found something he came running to them. The find of the day had been the brooch. It was a beautiful, intricate, and damaged thing. The boy gave it to his mum.