Everything I Found on the Beach

by Cynan Jones

  “The throttle will be in your hand, like a motorbike.” He showed them surreptitiously on the motor by his legs. “That’s forward and reverse. That lever there. And those are the gears.”

  The other men watched. They glanced now and then at the pilothouse and rode up and down with the boat.

  “The sea will push you left, right, and center,” said the man. “You just have to keep correcting. Follow the nose of the compass. You’ll work out soon enough, but it goes the opposite way.” He shifted the tiller from side to side, looking up at the pilothouse. “It’s like reversing a trailer,” he said, “it goes the opposite way to your steer.”

  Every now and then the boat seemed to be making harder work through the water but when the man came out to talk to them about what would happen now they seemed to be idling. Grzegorz was sure they were headed in circles. The cold had begun to bite them, even through the big puffer jackets they had. Grzegorz looked at his phone for the time. Harry spoke to him.

  “Nie ma tutaj zasięgu.”

  “Nor me,” said Grzegorz. “I don’t have a signal either.”

  The men watched in the trawler as the lights of the plane showed and heard the radio confirming the drop and saw the plane go over and the dark mass drop into the water. They rode the trawler to it and helped lift in the mass with gaff hooks by the netting it was covered with, and they stood back and watched the crew open the package and tear off the layer upon layer of hessian and polyethylene and watched as they measured the pack into smaller packages. It seemed to take forever.

  As he watched, Grzegorz thought of his wife and the two sons and of the new life he could make with the ten thousand he would be paid.

  They inflated the boats that were tied to the trawler and the generator on the boat was extraordinarily loud. They fitted on the motors with the heavy fuel tanks and extra fuel and took the packages they were given, and three miles from shore headed in to the different landing points they were allocated.

  Most of the Poles had lied about handling a boat before. It was testament to the quality of their lies that they were entrusted with the packages. But then, there was the surety of their families. At the time Grzegorz was inflating the boat, his wife was up with their child who couldn’t sleep and was asking for him.

  They had electronic compasses and they had been pre-set to give the men bearings.

  The men dispersed in the water and the trawler went off and there in the dark Grzegorz’s compass failed. It was as simple as that. The software just froze.

  He seemed to go for hours, hopefully. He headed the boat at the line of lights he could see way off in the distance, taking them to be the coast, but they were the scallop boats and when he had realized and turned away he was totally disoriented.

  Hold drove to Cara’s and looked at the house. He knew she was at work. He looked at the knife on the front seat, some talisman, and said to himself that it would be enough. It brought some sense of something else to this.

  He got out from the van with the box and took the key from its hanging place and went into Danny’s shed. He saw the ambergris cutting, pinned up, faded, the triumphant men who had found it beaming from the picture, Danny’s outside “maybe.”

  “What would you have done with this?” he said. “Your ‘maybe’ came in.”

  He pushed the box of his things in at the back of a high shelf among rusted tins of paints and boat varnish. “That’s me,” he thought. “They can do what they like to the trailer now. I don’t care about anything else.”

  He got back in the van. The new plastic of the cooler stank on the passenger seat. He’d stopped for money and the roll of notes was curled up in the driver’s doorwell. The phone was on the seat next to the bag and the in-car charger went umbilically from it to the lighter socket. “Make sure you’re near the phone. Get to the port. Wait.” Those were his instructions.

  He looked at the rabbits in the bag and he thought of the man and he heard repeated the harrowing pleading of the woman’s voice and thought of Cara sleeping in the room next to the boy that night and it was as if only then he truly acknowledged that he had left one world. That how things had been would never come back to him. Things went cement just then. He looked out behind the house at the rising light.

  He looked at the map, traced the red and green lines. “Straight line,” he said to himself. “It’s just a straight line now.”

  The big Irishman stepped outside the pub and set his pint down on the sill and started methodically to roll himself a cigarette. It was a process that looked incongruous for him with his huge hands and yet he was deft at it and there was something almost childlike about it. It was barely midmorning but a noise spilled out of the pub already.

  The big man was about to light up when another man came out of the door with a phone in his hand looking for the big man. He gave the big man the handset and said, “Call…” just to say something and the big man waited with his hand over the mouthpiece until the man, who was the barman, had gone back inside. The phone looked like a toy in his hand.

  “Yeah?”

  Two other men were coming outside for cigarettes with pints in their hand and the big man looked at them and they nodded and went back inside.

  “It’s Stringer.”

  “Stringer.”

  “We’ve had the call.”

  The big man waited for Stringer to talk things through. He listened while Stringer gave him the details, then he took the phone back into the pub.

  Stringer had got the call first thing.

  “No connection,” the man had said. “Everything will be waiting for you, the usual way.” There was the hint of scouse accent.

  “The taxi driver?”

  The man made an affirmative noise down the phone.

  “You want it quiet?” Stringer asked.

  “No. Send a message.”

  “How loud?”

  “Very loud.”

  Stringer understood.

  Hold drove north. He tried to focus but he was dogged with thought. He heard the child’s voice on the phone, the almost bird-like greeting of tata. He had a picture of how old the boy was from the phone and hoped he was too young for this thing to register. He knew absolutely how it would be when tata did not come home.

  His mother had drunk in darker moods before his father left, but it took a real grip once he went. It took Hold years to piece together the damage of that abandonment but as a child it washed over him straight away. His father simply didn’t come home one day. All his mother’s emotions seemed to collapse in on themselves; and while they moldered inside her, the fruits of the fungus came out as great spores of blame. The abandonment somehow affected her worse than all his father’s brooding moods. She blamed herself for not being able to lift them off him.

  Hold was just at the wrong age. He was at the age where the sight of his mother in despair set off some heroism in him.

  He wanted to be like Danny’s father. He had strange mixed-up feelings of relief that his father had gone, but he could not help the anger at the rubble it left of his mother and he dealt with that as he had learned to deal with everything else by then: to package things up tightly, to make a small solid thing of himself, something solid enough to support things.

  He was Jake’s age, thereabouts, when it happened. His father’s act had been a willful decision and Hold made a promise to himself—with the great affecting seriousness and belief of a child’s promise—that he would never let people down that way.

  It was only when he was older that he saw the drink take great lumps from his mother, thought guiltily of how he would bring her glass after glass and feel somehow privileged at the smile she gave him.

  He grew overprotective, perhaps, especially of his younger sister. She was out in Australia now. They hadn’t really spoken for years. She said she couldn’t cope with him being so protective of her, like he was throttling her. He blamed his father.

  He wanted to make things right. He believed that you could s
ort things out; that you shouldn’t give up on things. There was always a way. He felt that he had not been old enough to prevent his mother’s drinking, hadn’t understood it then; that he was wrong to be so protective of his sister; how perhaps the early baby was a way of screaming finally in his face that she could do what she pleased. He felt a great sense that he had got it wrong back then because he didn’t know enough. It had just solidified into a haunting determination to do better. That had been the most crippling thing about Danny’s death. That it could not be sorted out. But this was different. He thought of Danny and his belief in the impossible. “Something will always come along. If you do things for the right reasons.” He had not believed in chance and Danny had, and here it was. He thought of their ambergris, the hallowed newspaper cutting, the one in a million find. This was it. Ambergris. Something had come along. And all he had to do was see it through.

  He passed through the changing landscape, noticed the rhododendron begin to grow loose on the hills, and he went on north. In among the evergreens, the bare deciduous trees had the silvery and papery look of wasp nests.

  He thought of Danny’s shed and then of the nest on the house. They had taken up the old floorboards, exposing the ceiling beams so you could see right through to the roof of the house. They piled the wood outside and watched the wasps strip the paper-fine layers off the boards with this repetitive, constant sound that seemed way too loud for something so small to make, gathering the pulped wood in their mouths.

  While they rebuilt the annex they could hear the industry of the wasps crunching in the late spring warmth and they watched the small acorn of nest grow in the gable in the sun. All the time, this thing building that was dangerous and beautiful, but unnerving in its purpose.

  By the time they had got the walls of the annex up the nest was as big as a football. When Hold went out there at night and stood below the nest he could hear it humming as the wasps fanned the warm air out of the nest with their wings.

  “I want Jake here,” Danny said. “I can imagine us all. Get that garden cleared. You have to have something to be doing things for,” he said. “There has to be a purpose.”

  I guess we didn’t come far, thought Hold. We grew up playing in that house and making up dreams in it, and we were still doing it in our thirties. He could feel the brick in his hand now, the weight of it, its roughness. The purposeful process of putting one brick down upon another. “They’ve been the same for thousands of years,” he thought. “The size of a man’s hand. That dictates everything—the size of the thing we can handle. What we can build like that.”

  “I want Jake here,” Danny said.

  In the end, the great robins had taken to battering into the nest to knock the young grubs out. Then the magpies watched, learned, and just came in and hammered it down. All of that constructed because they were programmed that way. All that careful building and something just came along and battered it all down.

  “I have to stay focused,” thought Hold. “I have to stop thinking of things.”

  For a while he considered throwing the rabbits and their dangerous guts to the side of the road, and of turning home. “These thoughts are little tests of you,” he said to himself. “You know you have options.” But he was haunted.

  He couldn’t stop thinking of the Polish woman. Of the distraught tone of her voice. He could picture her too clearly. His mother, Cara. It would be the same scene. The same collapsing. Checkham. Vrooj prosser. Checkham, checkham. He thought of the dead man in the boat. It would be out of fuel by now, adrift again with the stiffened body. And then he saw the police car.

  His stomach turned over. The car gained on him a few yards and then steadied, keeping a distance behind him.

  Why were they out here? This was nowhere. Hold thought of the tires, the brake lights, hoped nothing would draw attention to him. He drove carefully, but felt a nervous hesitancy on the corners that made him seem conspicuous.

  “They can’t be here for you,” he thought. It was like his thoughts were out loud. “Why would they know? There’s just the random chance they’ll stop you. Why would they even look at the rabbits?”

  He looked at the mirror. There were two men in the car. “I should stop,” he thought. “This is madness. Just stop and tell them everything.” The possibility of it made him feel sick. Then they turned on the lights.

  They’d timed it so that he could pull over easily into the turnout that came up on his left and he fought this crazy urge to try and outrun them. He felt drained of focus. Give it up. This is your chance to get out.

  He pulled the van into the stop and switched off the engine. “Choose,” he said to himself. “Choose now.”

  The police officer knocked on the window and Hold wound it down.

  “Afternoon, sir,” said the policeman.

  Hold could sense the cooler with the rabbits on the front seat.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Do you mind stepping out of the car.”

  Hold got out of the van and saw the other policeman checking the vehicle.

  “Your van, sir?” asked the first policeman.

  “Had her for years,” said Hold.

  “And where are you off to?”

  Hold veered. “Can I ask why I’ve been stopped?”

  “Oh. Just routine, sir. Just a check. Nothing to worry about, I’m sure. Full MOT?”

  Hold nodded. The other policeman was checking the tires.

  “Mind if we take a look inside?”

  It’s your chance, right here, to give it up. You can end this now.

  “No. On you go.”

  The policeman nodded to the other policeman. “Do you have your driver’s license? Insurance documents on you?” The other policeman had opened the back and the doors squealed as he leaned into the van.

  “I don’t, no.” Hold thought of the box on the shelf in Danny’s shed, had a fleeting image of Cara finding it. Of his being jailed. “They’re at home.” I can’t let that happen. I have to get back to her.

  “Which is where, sir? Your address?”

  Hold told him.

  “And your name?”

  Hold gave him the information.

  “Any ID?” asked the policeman.

  “No, not with me,” he said. Hold thought of the box again.

  “I’ll have to ask you to present your documents to your local station within seven days. Just routine, sir.”

  “No problem.”

  The other policeman came round with a handful of cartridges. “You own a shotgun, sir?”

  “Yes. Sorry. They must have come out of their box. I have a license.”

  The two police looked a little more thoughtful. You could see this cautious change come over them.

  The one doing the talking got on the radio and radioed the information in, asking about the driver and the shotgun licenses.

  “You can tell them. You can tell them now,” thought Hold. He waited while the voice through the radio came back with the information. There was this static squeak. The other officer was going round again kicking the tires.

  “Where did you say you were headed?” asked the policeman.

  “To a friend.” Hold picked a place out of the air, hoping it was far enough from them.

  “What’s the address?” The policeman had the notebook out and was waiting for the address.

  “I don’t know,” said Hold. “I couldn’t tell you.” He made this huge gamble. “I could drive you there, but I’ve no idea of the actual address.”

  Hold thought of his box of things on the shelf. Had a vision of Cara finding them. Had a vision of him having achieved nothing more than turning himself into a greater burden to her, a dead weight in jail she would feel tied to. The policeman looked at him and closed the notebook.

  “We’ll need you to present your gun license along with your other documents, when you take them in,” he said.

  “Of course,” said Hold. He could feel his pulse smash in his chest now, hoping
it didn’t show all over him.

  The policeman leaned into the window.

  “Shoot those yourself, did you?” said the police, nodding at the rabbits on the seat.

  “Two-two,” said Hold. “Not a shotgun.”

  The policeman nodded as if he understood. There was this rich stream of adrenaline through Hold like he had too much blood.

  You’ve chosen. Right there. That was it. You cannot consider any doubt any more.

  “Well, thank you for your cooperation, sir. You can go on your way.”

  “That’s fine,” said Hold. “Have a good day.”

  He got in the van and started the engine and waited for the police to drive off but they flashed him on.

  He let a car go past and pulled out and they pulled out behind him and stuck to him again as if they were waiting for him to slip up. He could see the one not driving on the radio.

  “They know,” he thought. “They’re going to stop you again. They’re just waiting.” Then they closed in on him and overtook, and disappeared ahead on the straight.

  “Why? Why did I make this choice?” Grzegorz thought. But he knew. “I know why I made this choice. You always have to wait in line. All my life I’ve been waiting in line. Wait your turn, know your place. That’s all there is. I wanted to change something.”

  Grzegorz held the compass in his hands and pressed the buttons uselessly. He was totally and absolutely lost on the utter pitch darkness of the sea. Only the compass screen glowed, with this factual light. He felt the urge to cry, like a distant need he still associated with childhood. He felt defiant little angers in him. He felt pricks of hope. Fear. But he could not hold on to any of them, not on to one single emotion. Then it was like he shut his eyes to them.

  The sun had seemed to drop quickly.

  He waited with the others outside the gates. He had just come off shift, had peeled off the once-white overalls, now, by the end of shift, plastered in blood and tissue. It was cold outside the gates, but a different cold from the deliberate cold inside of the abattoir where the fresh blood was like warm water on his hands and he welcomed that warmth.