Everything I Found on the Beach

by Cynan Jones

  Had he known then, waiting there, smoking, that it would come to this? Had he, underneath, the understanding of this? He had felt it. He had ignored it. He had jumped off the bridge.

  The sweat dried on his body and he felt the cold go. He thought of the different types of cold, the cold of the fields at home that was so complete it was almost imperceptible until you felt your bones ache, your teeth throb. He thought of the salt-laden cold of the bracing space of the beach, the cold gritty sand between his fingers, the sense of the slow vast fridge of water. Even the way the gulls were colored, in gray shades.

  “I have to stop thinking of the cold,” he told himself. He had one or two cigarettes and he lit one.

  “They bullied me, but that was fine,” he thought. “It’s not my reason for doing this. I can’t pretend it is. I just had this hope, that’s all. They didn’t drive me to this.”

  The small sepal of the boat showed up in the glow of the indrawn cigarette.

  He thought of fires as a child. There were always fires. He thought of the great stack of dirty straw smoking in the field, the smell of it drifting on the subdued autumn breeze.

  “I couldn’t have stayed,” he thought. “A man has to try to improve things.”

  He finished the cigarette. He felt nothing now. The problem had stopped feeling real. He was at that stage when he believed he had overreacted. Maybe it was the cigarette. It just brought a little calmness. He threw it into the sea and the pitch blackness came around him again.

  He took the compass out from inside his puffer jacket where he’d put it to warm, thinking it might have frozen in the cold.

  “Can electricity freeze?” he wondered. He had this picture of lightning coming down into the stubble fields, the glorious momentary frozenness of it, the whitening of the air around.

  The compass’s square of clinical light was mesmerising, hypnotic, the only point of reference in the dark. He used the luminance torchlike to look for anything that might work to press within the tiny reset hole. There was nothing. There was just nothing on the boat.

  “Your friend talked to you?”

  “Yes, he talked to me.”

  “You want the work?”

  He’d nodded.

  “How much did he say? How much did he tell you?”

  “Everything, I think.”

  He’d been momentarily distracted by a cloud of egrets that lifted off the beach and flew strangely away, their necks folded. They didn’t seem to fit there in that place, seemed too beautiful, like some anomaly.

  “He told you of the risk?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your family?” The man had repeated the requirements.

  Grzegorz looked down at the compass, sure the light was fading, sensing in his hand the battery draining out. He thought of the passivity of the cows, going to the stun plate.

  “I understand…”

  They watched the trucks come in. As they waited for the driver to pick them up, a long truck packed with lambs came through and went in through the big zinc gates and as they passed, Grzegorz saw the stubborn, incomprehensible eyes. They were mad, somehow.

  “I understand.”

  A little way down the road he stopped again. The adrenaline of the police stop had rolled up in him and he felt queasy, travel-sick almost. He’d gone through the quarry towns, set precariously in amongst the banks of scree, and there was something megalithic in them, some sense of his own smallness as the mountains grew bigger. He felt tiny against them, and against the massive industry man was capable of.

  “I should have left something for Cara,” he thought. “What if I don’t get back?” He felt that he was drawing all his sentiments and knowledges of this thing from some Sunday afternoon Western now, overdramatizing it. It did not feel real. With the tiredness and the driving and the ebbing adrenaline, everything suddenly became surreal in one gutting flash, and he felt absolutely out of his depth and angry about being given this chance. How could he turn away from it? Everything was at stake now. It had been delivered up to him and given him the possibility of things.

  He felt dizzy and stopped the van, pulled up into a gateway. Like some chasm, the valley and the dark lake sat before him. He got out of the van and stared down into this drop, this void. He had a vision of himself angry, saw himself scream and smash things, had this great feeling for the need for release. The phrase was going over and over in his head. Checkham. Prosser checkham. “You stupid boy,” he thought. “You stupid, stupid boy.” But still he couldn’t beat out the phrase that was becoming like a little song in him, as if the packets were calling somehow.

  I could go into a hotel or a supermarket or somewhere, there are loads of foreign workers here now. I could find someone who might talk the language. I don’t want to draw attention to myself though. You can’t just go round asking questions of strangers. Stay focused. It doesn’t matter what it means.

  The wilderness seemed to gape at him, beckon open-mouthed at him like some great animal. He pictured hurling the rabbits and their dangerous guts into this maw, pictured turning round and heading home. He wanted so much to convince himself this was for some purpose all of his own, so he could walk away from it, lift his eyes up from it. He tried to drag Cara out of the reason for this, tried to disbelieve it was the Polish woman’s fault. Who was she anyway? A criminal’s wife. An immigrant. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t raise the hate.

  He thought of the voice on the phone, of the child and of the baby, and he felt very clearly how it would be for them now. Vrooj prosser checkham. He thought of the words, they started to ring in his head again. And he thought of the threat to them that had been made and thought, “No, I cannot throw these packets away now. It’s almost as if they have some kind of life of their own, that they are making a demand.” In his decisiveness, he was trigger finger, barrel, and bullet all, and the ridding himself of these packages came to him only as a fantasy, as a thing possible to a man who had not yet made this decision. “I am doing this thing now,” he repeated. Once you pull the trigger, you are responsible for everything that happens in the path of that bullet. You can get all the way to having something in your sights and you can still back out. But if you do pull the trigger, you’re up. You follow it through. You can’t call the bullet back. “Don’t put this on her,” he said. “Don’t make this some moral thing.” It wouldn’t be a get out to say you’d done it because they had been threatened. “This is part of your choice.” It would make a difference to them though, perhaps, if they knew. If they knew he didn’t just abandon them. That perhaps he was doing something he thought would help things. He ought to give them that.

  He got back in the van and sat there. He sat there and looked at his hands on the steering wheel, looked at the raising welt on his thumb where the skin was reddened and had started to gather a small reservoir of pus. “It’s just the ignorance of it that’s scaring you,” he said. “It’s that you don’t know about it. You had your chance to get out just then with the police and you didn’t even really consider it. You just have to stop thinking it’s a cowboy film. Nothing’s going to happen.”

  He looked at the rabbits in the bag on the seat next to him and felt as if there was a hum coming from the packets, some sinister, persuasive beat. He thought of the house renewed. He thought of Cara and Jake. Had this picture of them settled. Of dangerous hope. He threw this back like a little mechanism to make himself go on. If you can do this, if you’ve got the balls for this, then you’ve got the balls to say you want her.

  “Just don’t lose your nerve,” he thought. “Just hold your nerve, now.”

  Grzegorz thought about the details he had solemnly handed the man about his wife and children and tried for hours with the compass until he eventually hurled it into the night and screamed and beat the boat, thinking of his family.

  He thought of his wife this morning, the passive tired want in her eyes as he left for work and she queued for the bathroom with the babies. He had wanted to hold her,
tell her, but he couldn’t. Not just because he couldn’t tell her of the job he was to do, but from habit too. They had fallen out of the habit of touching each other. He seemed to have grown this shell on himself, but it felt not like something that had grown from within, but like the outside around him had stuck on to him, somehow. Covering him up, like being buried alive.

  She just stood in the queue and he left, confused at himself, confused at the faint, exhausted distance to her now. He felt she’d got to a point of carelessness. “I came with you,” she seemed to say. “You promised me things and you didn’t bring them to me.”

  It was not gone though. He knew that. Whatever the brittleness between them in the day, there was a sad softness in the night. Something automatic, beyond them. It was the place. The situation was the problem and it had been he who brought them here, brought them here away from her mother and sisters, and she had followed because she believed in him.

  “Jest mi zimno.”

  “Boję się.”

  “Jestem spragniony.”

  “Jestem głodny.”

  I am cold. I am scared.

  I am thirsty. I am hungry.

  He thought of her softness and it gave him a great, angry hopelessness.

  “Mam nadzieję, ż e nie gniewasz się za bardzo.”

  “I hope you’re not too angry,” he thought again. “I had to try.”

  Eventually, he ran out of fuel and partially refilled the tank but did not know he had to prime the fuel through and so the boat just started drifting.

  That far out Grzegorz had no signal on his phone. He had not told his wife what he was doing and she did not know where he was. When the drift brought him within a mile of the coast the messages began to come through. Some of them had hung in the air waiting for the phone for days. At one point so many messages came through that the phone seemed to flash. By then, without food or water and with the extreme cold, Grzegorz Przybylski was dead.

  Snow still lay in the shadows of the hillcrests but Hold looked down onto the difficult roads and drove carefully, and with focus cut through this rubble and monumental ancientness until he crossed the water onto the sudden flatness of the island, the mountains rising behind him as if they were closing him in to some great amphitheater.

  The road opened into an easy dual roadway, seemed to offer movement through the scoured scene powdered with gorse and new lambs. He had the sensation of being cast toward the place, as if let from an open hand after the bunched fist of the mountains. A die rolled onto a table.

  As he drove, a beetle worked its way along the dashboard. It was tiny, jewel-like in the light that got through the windshield, itself like some piece of crushed glass.

  Hold kept his eyes on the road but all the time they were drawn to the tiny beetle, smaller than his fingernail.

  The beetle walked industriously around and traveled down the face of the panel and stopped, sensing the moving draft through the air vent. It turned and headed back up the slope, then opened its wing cases in its mechanical-looking way and it went up into the air with the faintest hum and clicked clumsily against the windshield.

  “It doesn’t matter where you try to go,” thought Hold. “You’re in this van now, and you’re going where it’s going, whatever you do inside the space of it.”

  The tiny beetle worked along the inside of the glass, and went out of sight.

  For a moment his stomach turned at the sign for a vehicle checkpoint until he drove past another saying that the checkpoint was closed, and more distinct in the March light as he approached it, there was the lump of Holy Island. The checkpoint sign had set the word in his head again, checkham, checkham.

  As he drove over the causeway to the port a flock of curlews lifted over the wall and cut across above him and disappeared into the thin marsh at the side of the road and he remembered the strangeness he felt on the cliffs. This great split in his life had come within that strangeness, and it was as if they were some sign.

  Over the causeway he came into the mouth of the town. After the long, straight drive it was a kind of shock. The busyness of the signage and the choices to make almost caught him off guard.

  There was something beckoning and mesmeric about the way to the dock but he bore left into the town with this uneasy feeling of nervous avoidance he didn’t understand fully. Then the idea of the police and the customs officers at the port sat up in him like something remembered suddenly and he thought of the rabbits and their vital insides. “That was it,” he thought. “That was what is strange about the land here. The whole place looks like it’s been cropped by rabbits.”

  After the busyness and internationalism of the roads that went off to the port, Hold expected the town to be bigger and he seemed immediately to be headed up out of the place almost as soon as he’d turned into it. The houses and shops around him were rough and hard and salty looking.

  He went up a short climb out of what must have been the heart of the town and parked. He was uneasy. “Come on, focus,” he thought. He thought the town would be bigger and hold an anonymity for him but he felt exposed already. He parked, feeling that the van drew attention to him. “It is what it is,” he told himself. “You can’t make assumptions.” Everything seemed to be private houses, people’s homes. A place people worked, he thought, not a place people fed off. The sort of place people get noticed. It had a mixed-up oldness and newness, a kind of utility to it.

  He saw a sign for Ucheldre and knew he was in the high part of the town. He took the things he needed from the van and put them into the small bag and slung it over his shoulder and went to the parking meter then came back and put in the ticket and took up the bag of rabbits and looked around for the way into town.

  He walked away from the van and looked back at it as if checking to see if it looked anonymous and he realized that he was tired now from the driving. He could feel this warm, comfortable spring sun on him like a little gift. He put his coat over the rabbits, hiding them in the bag that wouldn’t close.

  “It’s fine,” he thought. “You need to relax.” He could feel the weight of the rabbits and the kilo of drugs and looked around and tried to get some sense of the place, of the layout. Then he followed the signs into town.

  His mind drifted. It seemed to come into color, warmed by the sun, like a scent lifting. He thought of the drugs being tracked and remembered the metal detector all over again and thought of the time Danny had hidden things and of the brooch, and then of the time Danny had got some shark’s teeth from a souvenir shop and hidden them around. “Rare as a hen’s teeth,” he had said to the boy. “I bet you could find some hen’s teeth if you looked, as long as you believed in them,” and he gave Jake ten pence for each one he found. “I guess he never stopped believing in treasure, Danny,” thought Hold. “I guess none of us really do.”

  He walked into the center of the small town to the pedestrian area and was startled again by the market, as he had been by the choice of roads. He felt overaware of the bag he carried, he felt watched. “You can’t be,” he said. “They don’t know you. They don’t know who you are. Just be natural,” he thought. It was like he existed in a kind of pod.

  He crossed the pedestrian area, passed the closed Woolworth, and followed the natural draw downhill and went through an alleyway onto a new bridge and over the road. It was odd, this beautiful bridge against the wasted buildings of the town.

  He stood for a while in the sun on the new incongruous bridge watching the cars beneath on the road, trying to get a sense of the place all the time; then he headed over the bridge, over the railway tracks and the still span of enclosed water to the ferry complex on the other side. There was this reassuring salt smell off the bay.

  “I could just go,” he thought. “Nobody knows about Cara and Jake. I could just go.” He looked out, feeling the calm sense of the water, and he was unused to feeling this in a town. This wasn’t his environment. He did not have a natural understanding of it, how to fit into it, but he felt the sense
of the water and of the sun. “No,” he said. He looked back at the dirty town buildings by the road. “I don’t have my passport. Do I need a passport for Ireland? You wouldn’t go anyway. Stop thinking the thing. You’re just going to see this through.”

  He went in to the Tourist Information Office and found some maps, a town guide.

  “Would you like any help?” the girl asked pleasantly but it was strange in the nasal North Walian whine.

  “No, I’m fine,” Hold said. “I don’t need anything.”

  The place was full of Welsh dragons and fudge. He looked at a rack of postcards, jokes, women in stovepipe hats. All these clichés. “Maybe I should let her know,” he thought, thinking of Cara. He did not articulate the thought in his own mind: in case I don’t come back. “That’s a cliché too,” he thought. “Stop thinking like you’re in some cowboy film.” He felt like he needed a conversation with himself. “Just get it done,” he said.

  He went out of the Information Center and walked back toward the bridge. “I have to know this place,” he thought. He felt this need for proactivity. “I have to get to know this place.” He checked the phone with a sudden thought that he might have somehow missed a call, or not have a signal. No. It was fine. He looked for a while at the train lines and considered how the meeting would happen, where the men would come from. Then he went back over the bridge.

  The thickset redhead stood in the station by the information boards with the black leather sports bag cradled on the floor between his feet. He stood under the paneled glass roof staring up at the great structure of the strut work and held the cardboard cup full of coffee.

  The station throbbed and rushed with people. Some scallies were shouting and pranking over by the palm trees that grew surreally inside the station and two uniformed policemen stood there tiredly watching. The man thought of the bag between his feet and imagined he could sense a heat off it. The scallies were shouting and yelping formlessly. They all wore hoods and looked the same. You could tell what the police wanted to do. He wanted to do it himself. He imagined cracking their heads together in an effective way. Time was when he would have done that, maybe even the police would have, but not now. Now it was all business.