Everything I Found on the Beach

by Cynan Jones

“That’s pretty cool,” Hold had said.

  “I didn’t put that there,” said Danny secretively. He had this massive, victorious wide grin.

  The boy noticed Hold looking at the instrument.

  “We could go treasure hunting,” said the boy, and Hold looked thoughtfully at him.

  “Maybe there’s treasure on the beach.”

  “Maybe there is,” said Hold. “Maybe there’s ambergris.”

  The word had this kind of magic sense to it.

  “What’s ambergris?” asked the boy.

  Jake was picking at the chips with his hands and his mother gave him a look that stopped him.

  “Ambergris?” said Hold. The boy was looking at him. He remembered Danny’s newspaper cutting, the way he had waved it with this intent belief they could find some, that it would fall to them. More, that he lived always with this chorus behind him, “What if?,” always, “What if?”

  “It’s whale sick,” said Hold. The boy eew-ed and laughed and did not believe him and thought he was starting one of those games grown-ups do.

  “It’s whale sick and it smells of cow poo. Cow poo and perfume. Like a farm girl on a night out.” The boy was delighted.

  Cara was trying to be stern but was smiling and warm at seeing the boy laugh. “Men bring an irreverence,” she thought. “It’s good to have that.” She looked at Hold ladling mayonnaise onto his plate and missed the capableness and the solidity that can be in a man’s hands.

  “It’s something very rare,” said Hold, getting serious. “It’s grayish, and it stinks, and a piece the size of your plate is worth more than a new car.”

  The boy’s eyes went cartoon wide. “No way,” he said.

  “Look it up,” Holden said. “Maybe there’s some on the beach.” He thought of Danny’s chorus: never rule out maybe. What if? What if, really? What would he do for the chance to be able to lift all this, lift her and the boy off the tracks they were stuck on?

  Cara looked at him. Sometimes she felt as if she had one-half of a man and under her clothes she could feel her body going to waste. It was he who had drawn the line. She would never hold it against him if he loved her. It was his standing off that was difficult to take.

  After supper he said, “I could take him with me tonight,” and she had said, “No.” The boy was washing up and the industrious clattering came from the kitchen. Hold was toying with the salt grinder, making rings of salt on the tablecloth and pushing them into shapes with his fingers.

  “He’s old enough now,” Hold said. He put the salt grinder down. “He wouldn’t shoot. He’d just walk with me. It might even put him off, seeing it. It does some people. He’s not going to let go of it otherwise.”

  Cara looked at him. “It’s a school night.”

  “Most of the kids will be up on their computers.”

  “Not mine.” She was quiet.

  “He won’t let it go, you know.”

  She could feel very much that it was Hold who wanted the boy to go with him, and she waited for a long time. She felt sometimes that she should try to make the decisions Danny would have made, and not just her own. To be fairer to the boy. And she knew that she was out of her depth trying to bring up a boy and give him the leeway he would require in all the things he would want. She had a great urge to hold Danny at the thought of the boy’s growing up, and in a split second she saw his broadening, and the ropes and sinews come into his arms and legs and the coming angularity of him. “I need help with all this,” she felt. “It’s too much, all these decisions on my own.”

  “How long will you be out?” she asked him.

  “I could go out earlier, for an hour or two with him, and bring him back. There won’t be much anyway. I could drive down for the nets after.”

  “And he won’t shoot?”

  “He’ll just walk with me, and see it.” He played with the sore atop his thumb, looking down to see if he could tell what was under it.

  Cara stood up and called the boy and he came through. “Sit down,” she said.

  He was worried underneath being told to sit down. This is how it had come. There was always that doubt after that, his emotions all curled up like a cat, waiting to react to the huge, incomprehensible news. He knew it was stupid to feel it, but he couldn’t help it coming. Hold knew it, recognized it.

  She told him that if he went to bed now, and got some sleep, he could go shooting tonight. Just for a few hours. Then she went out and finished the clearing up.

  Danny had died without any cover. In this, there was a crippling lack of responsibility and Hold had had a great anger at his friend, and Cara had understood in those brief angry, bereft moments when he could not help her seeing that it had always been that way, and that it was he who had always exercised the practicalities, the safeties for what they did. The pot of water when they lit fires, the flares for the boat, calling the coastguard in advance when they went out on the boat for the night. Danny had never considered that things could go wrong, turn for the worst. Or if he had, he buried his head from them. It was what was engaging about him, but it worked only with the balancing responsibility Hold took.

  Hold had sold the boat, and she had seen the great wrench of that as if someone had lifted a part of him away. She knew it was their dream between them, a few years on to work the boat and live by fishing and she could never erase the way his face looked when it went. The humble money from that had got her through the immediate costs and with her work she could just clear the mortgage. But there was nothing over. There was enough value in the old house to set them up, but she couldn’t consider that with the way Danny had been about it, with the way Hold had taken on the responsibility of it. Sometimes she saw it as this great weight that was just dragging them all down, keeping Hold in Danny’s shadow, a locked up store of money, a constant reminder of the past she wished inside she could just break away from, a millstone dragging them always into the great sea of his absence.

  She wanted to be let go. She could not bear the not being there of him and was confused by the emotions that were growing in her that seemed a betrayal of this great feeling.

  “It’s just not possible,” the bank had said, and she had felt this internal, secret relief, that the house would go. She understood the responsibility Hold felt, understood how it felt for someone to invest their dreams in you the way Danny did. How that made you feel valuable and needed in a way that was difficult to get free from. But Hold too was a confusion to her now, a weight on her moving on. She did not know whether it was love because that thing seemed too fragile for her now but she had fallen in great care with him. It was just another fact. Another little awareness that made itself known to her, awareness which made her desperate, so she could feel small hatreds of herself growing inside, things she tried to accept or cocoon so they did not seep through her and bitter everything.

  She felt, despite this great want to be around him, that it was unfair of him to be there. Sometimes she wanted to orchestrate something that would finalize it, that he could not forgive himself for. She thought of his hands on her, how her body missed touch.

  Hold me, or let me go, let us go. It’s stifling you bringing him back into our life every time.

  Hold came back about eleven and took the key from the nail in the porch and let himself in and put the stuff he had got together for the boy on the floor and went through to the kitchen and turned on the kettle to fill up the flasks.

  She said she’d be in bed. “You wake him. Make it a man thing,” she said. “Just bring him back.” That sentence was so loaded that it went right through Holden when she said it. There was nothing strong enough he could say to it.

  He put boiled water in the flasks to warm them and went to the boy’s room. Jake was sleeping. He’d got his penknife and a first aid kit out by his bed and had pulled green and camouflage clothes out from his drawers.

  Hold looked down at the boy and shook him gently and said his name. He felt a strange sense of fathership, beyond his o
wn flesh and blood. The boy looked perturbed in his sleep. Because you couldn’t see the old-looking eyes the boy had, from what he’d been through, he looked much younger sleeping. The boy had her eyes, and without them Hold could see Danny very clearly in the boy.

  He shook Jake again but he didn’t wake. It was as if he was concentrating on sleep. And seeing him sleeping that way, Hold suddenly had no desire to wake him. As if he acknowledged that the boy wasn’t ready for this yet. That things should wait.

  He took the piece of shale he’d taken from the beach and put it down on the boy’s cabinet. It was rhomboid, smoothed at the corners, and the three clear crystals of fool’s gold lay in a line across it, like three small dice partway through a roll.

  He knew the boy was too old for it now, and would know it was worthless. But maybe he would play along. It’s what we feel something is that makes it important. In a fire, someone might grab the most worthless thing, a smooth pebble, a seashell, a dried old rose if their lover had given it to them. If they still had the energy to believe. It’s what a thing is capable of being that matters.

  He looked at the boy for an odd while, then went out of the room.

  He left the house and put the key through the door and got in the van. “I should have gone to her and told her that the boy wasn’t coming out with me,” he said inside himself. “She’ll work it out.” There was no way he could have gone into that room, and sometimes he knew that it was part cowardice at the responsibility he would have to take on then. It might be different if he had something that she could make a choice for. If the house was done. “I could never walk into that thing Danny has put around them, this bungalow, his place,” he thought. He could not imagine himself existing in his friend’s space, not like that.

  She heard him go and knew he had not taken the boy. And she had a strong image of him then, leaning over and helping her pull in the line, and not taking the rod off her. And then she felt this great goddamned confusion over him.

  He parked up the van and switched off the lights and the lights seemed to take a brief moment to go out. He knew she was right that the boy was too young to be with him for this but he also knew it was the sometimes female thing of not wanting your child to play with guns. Not from a sense of pacifism, but for the sense of responsibility it involved, and the growing up it represented. “I should take the boy out in the day and shoot some clays, show him the danger of this thing first,” he thought. There was a relief that the boy was not with him and he would not have to explain everything he did, but there was also the sense of responsibility to him; and there had come a strange sense in him, stronger as he had grown older, that the things he knew should be passed on, the sense that otherwise there was no point in things, and part of his encouragement of the boy was to give himself a chance of this.

  He poured a coffee out of the flask and set the cup down on the dashboard and watched the heat steam up the windshield by the cup. Below was the crush and swell of the tide going out and he could sense it in the rich and fertile moonlight. There was really a sense of being on the edge here.

  Further north, the bay curved round and you could see the lights of towns, but before him was the sea with just the few lights of the scallop boats out. It gave the sense of being at the edge of an element. It was like a limit, that water, and Hold felt it would be impossible for him to move away from it. It was as if he needed the sense of this limit somehow, the great, wide, humbling space of it. “If she moves away, I don’t think I’ll be able to follow,” he thought.

  He got out of the van and shook out the coffee cup and screwed it back onto the flask and put it in the driver’s doorwell and the van was very white in the moonlight. He looked up at the moon for a while, more because it was impossible not to look up at it, somehow. “Don’t think about all the other stuff now,” he said. “Put it away. It’s what you do this for.”

  He opened the back and took out the gun from its case and checked it over with his careful, rhythmic habit. He tapped the light in the van back as it went out briefly and it came back on with a small buzz and he looked at the bright moon again and knew it would mean the rabbits would see him. Then he put the gun back in the case and checked that the silencer was with him and put the loose bullets in his left coat pocket and picked up the game bag with a small jerk to hear that the knife and the scales were in it amongst the plastic bags he kept for the fish.

  He went round to shut the driver’s door and flicked down the sun visor and checked that in the pocket band was the five-pound note he was paid to keep the vermin down each year and that he kept from superstition—though he’d say he wasn’t a superstitious man.

  In this ritual, he could feel this first slight thing come up in him and some tone in his blood and he kept it down with this patient procedure. It was a thing peculiar only to the gun and having the gun near him and he associated it in his mind with the flavor the smell of the rifle made in his mouth. There was the metal smell of the barrel and the gun oil and casings and the brief taste of foil in his mouth so even the iron and oil of the van seemed amplified, and in this Pavlovian thing he felt his nostrils flare slightly and the oxygen feel better and more useful in his head. For him, there was a very right thing in all this and something very old. It was this rightness of it, not any love of killing or feel of sport, that was his reason for doing it, and in the focus of doing it he felt his other worries begin to leave him.

  He took the headlamp and checked it on and off and said in his head to remember to put it on charge in the morning. Then he shut the van and he opened the gate with the bag and the gun on his shoulder and went out onto the low slope at the top of the cliffs.

  It was in that rich and very fertile moonlight that he went on, following the sheep track to the fence that demarked the land he was paid to shoot over. And though he could see the gathering banks of cloud shift in from the south, in that moonlight he knew that there would be less chance of rabbits, but that the huge, social power of that moon would draw in the fish way up the beach inside the big tide, and that if the fish were there, they would go into the net.

  He swapped the bullets from the left pocket of his coat to his right in the final stage of his ritual and hung the game bag on the fence by the stile when he’d climbed over, with the split, blue polyethylene pipe over the barbed wire looking almost white in that moon.

  He took out the gun and checked it rhythmically again and checked the barrel and screwed on the silencer and rested it against the stile and folded up the gun bag and pushed it into the game bag and clipped up the straps. Then he took up his things and went on into the wind, the breeze taking the smell of him and of his metal and bags back behind him, and herding the sounds of him off.

  Below, the tide pounded with some sense of potential power contained, crushed languidly onto the beach. And though it hardly felt like anything, the breeze of that changing tide sounded heavier than it was, and he knew that where the rabbits would be, at the edge of the cliffs, it would be sloughing through the thorn, and in its loudness there would be cover for any noise he made.

  He knew the rabbits would see him in the moonlight and he stopped high up the slope and shaded the rifle from glinting in the moon with his arm and looked up toward the thin approaching cloud, the stars pendant in the night. Of the few star constellations that he knew, he could see Orion and felt for it some affinity, this son of the sea god, the hunter again to the hunter witness.

  When he drew his own constellations, as he had done as a child, it was a lobster he made out in these stars. If he had known that one of those stars was called Cara, he might have read into that something mysterious and read it as a message, or some sign. But he did not know, for all the years he had been looking at it and looking at her.

  “Cara,” he thought. He had this fear inside that when the house was gone she might move away, that perhaps it was only this physical anchor that kept her here. He had the sense of this as if it was a knowledge, and something that was bound to happen
. “I need them to be able to give to,” he thought. I couldn’t formalize it though. I need to be free to give. Feed the stray cat. If it gets to be something, they will expect reliability from me. I can’t face that dependence. I can’t face the responsibility of that.

  “If I had one chance,” he thought. “One chance then I could change it round.”

  He squatted before some gorse to break up his shape and could see from there, some hundred yards before him, the shape of the rabbits and picked them out from the molehills and humps of grass and easily when they moved by their moonlit tails. And they lopped and ate at the edge of the gorse and every now and then inquired into the night air as they finished the grass in their mouths with their rhythmic, vital chewing.

  He tried to push the thoughts from his mind, the other ghosts of distraction. This is why he came here, this is why he did this: to reach some space. To push everything else from his mind.

  A few fields over he could hear the bleats of the newly turned out lambs, calling for their mothers in the night, and the maternal patience in the answering mearghhs. The bad rain had kept off and it had been a good year for the lambs so far as the wet on their backs could bring them down very quickly. Somewhere, the plaintive call of a fox.

  He knew this place well now. The field he was in was not farmed hard and it was scattered with stands of blackthorn and gorse, and sprawling piles of bramble. Everything had a bonsai quality to it, a denseness brought on by the constant, stunting grazing, the tough salt wind.

  The first time he ever shot rabbits he was alone and it was with a shotgun and he had been looking for a long time with this growing sense he did not know how to do what he was doing. Then there were two in the top of the last field he came to. He instantly crouched. He could feel his heartbeat.

  The field gently curved in the middle and the rabbits were beyond the crest some way on the downward slope. The field had been plowed and rolled and new shoots of barley were coming through in it. It was some hundred meters to the rabbits.